Automotive industries require effective and reliable maintenance strategies to ensure high levels of availability and safety. Risk-based maintenance approach is a useful tool for maintenance decision making with the aim of reducing the overall risk in operating activities. In this paper, a Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) model as one of the risk assessment techniques is developed with subjective information derived from domain experts. To overcome the drawbacks of traditional FMEA for risk priority number (RPN) estimation, a linguistic fuzzy set theory, through effective decision attributes in complex automotive equipment is conducted. The main attributes of this approach include the effect of experts’ traits, scales variation, using various membership functions and defuzzification algorithms on reliable Fuzzy-RPN (FRPN) estimation. The result of the proposed model revealed that altering membership functions and defuzzification algorithms had no significant effect on the FRPN estimation, but their values are highly affected by the number of scales. The sensitivity analysis showed that experts’ traits have no sensible impact on experts’ opinion for FRPN estimation, while the detectability index has more impact on FRPN variation. The result of risk classification number showed that the maintenance decision making could be included for the failure modes with the highest RPN values as a priority, which it would be useful to achieve the high level of availability and safety.

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