Inspection activities in automotive manufacturing play a crucial role in diagnosing and preventing unexpected failures by adopting the well-planned intervals. However, finding the optimal inspection intervals has been a major concern within manufacturing systems due to the failure dependency issue caused by the design complexity and integrated operations. Hence, this paper proposes a new framework for inspection interval optimization under failure dependency in three steps; firstly identifying all failure modes and potential dependent failures through Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) method, secondly, adapting the statistical based approach for reliability and availability evaluation, as well as using the Bayesian theory for availability and total expected cost based inspection modeling under failure dependency and finally, performing some well-known Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) techniques for finding the optimal trade-off between main criteria e.g. total expected cost and reliability indices. The results of the proposed framework revealed that the failure dependency has a meaningful impact on inspection intervals. Besides, the cost-based model suggests shorter inspection intervals with that of the availability-based model in all dependent failure cases. As a consequence, the results could be useful for implementing the reliable maintenance programs to improve the operational performance of complex equipment in automotive manufacturing.

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