CASE STUDIES Development of a risk-based maintenance decision making approach for automotive production line Hamzeh Soltanali 1 • Abbas Rohani 1 • Mohammad Hossein Abbaspour-Fard 1 • Aditya Parida 2 • Jose ´ Torres Farinha 3 Received: 13 July 2018 / Revised: 25 November 2019 / Published online: 9 December 2019 Ó The Society for Reliability Engineering, Quality and Operations Management (SREQOM), India and The Division of Operation and Maintenance, Lulea University of Technology, Sweden 2019 Abstract 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 devel- oped 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 defuzzi- fication 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 classi- fication 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. Keywords Automotive industry  Fuzzy set theory  Maintenance decision making  RPN value  Sensitivity analysis 1 Introduction Reliability and safety issues are increasingly concerning in process industries, which have significant contribution satisfying the demand and increase the quality toward sustainable production (Verma et al. 2010; Soltanali et al. 2018; Di Bona et al. 2018). Risk analysis is one of the most important technique for evaluating the reliability and safety of production systems under Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) technique (Carbone and Tippett 2004; Bahill and Smith 2009). FMEA plays a key role to deal with the ensuring minimum risks (Hsu and Chen 1996; Keskin and O ¨ zkan 2009; Sharma and Sharma 2015). Besides, it is a regular employed procedure to achieve the continuous quality progress through prevention of failures and reducing their severity and occurrence, regarding & Abbas Rohani arohani@um.ac.ir Hamzeh Soltanali ha.soltanali@mail.um.ac.ir Mohammad Hossein Abbaspour-Fard abaspour@um.ac.ir Aditya Parida Aditya.Parida@ltu.se Jose ´ Torres Farinha torres.farinha@dem.uc.pt 1 Department of Biosystems Engineering, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran 2 Division of Operation and Maintenance Engineering, Lulea ˚ University of Technology, Lulea ˚, Sweden 3 Centre for Mechanical Engineering, Materials and Processes (CEMMPRE), ISEC - Coimbra Institute of Engineering, Coimbra, Portugal 123 Int J Syst Assur Eng Manag (February 2020) 11(1):236–251 https://doi.org/10.1007/s13198-019-00927-1