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The effective deployment of FMEAs within complex automotive applications faces a number of challenges, including the complexity of the system being analysed, the need to develop a series of coherently linked FMEAs at different levels within the systems hierarchy and across intrinsically interlinked engineering disciplines, and the need for coherent linkage between critical design characteristics cascaded through the systems levels with their counterparts in manufacturing. The approach presented in this paper to address these challenges is based on a structured Failure Mode Avoidance (FMA) framework which promotes the development of FMEAs within an integrated Systems Engineering approach. The effectiveness of the framework is illustrated through a case study, centred on the development of a diesel exhaust aftertreatment system.

Automotive design is becoming ever more complex with software controlled electromechanical systems becoming the norm in order to meet ever increasingly stringent legislative requirements and increasing customer expectations. Efficient design of such inherently complex systems calls for improvement to the engineering design process if robust and reliable product is to be designed. There is a tendency for such improvement to reflect the increased complexity of the designed systems with the design process itself becoming increasingly complex. This has been seen where a Failure Mode Avoidance (FMA) approach is used within product design with some of the individual FMA tools requiring increasing amounts of detail with this increasing complexity resulting in tools becoming progressively more cumbersome to use. A restricted toolset is often used and tools tend to be used non-synergistically with limited attention paid to the Systems Engineering demands of product design.

Adoption of new technology with ever increasing complexity challenges organizational structures and processes as subsystem ownership crosses several powertrain subsystem boundaries (and thereby involves multiple departments). Integrating such technology without introducing inadvertent failure modes can be a difficult task. This paper illustrates an upfront approach to understanding the potential system impact of using an example new technology. In product development activities involving primarily reuse of known technologies, organizational and subsystem boundaries are generally clear. Interfaces are well established and responsibilities for managing failure mode avoidance are generally known. Implementation of new technology which does not naturally fit the well-established organizational definitions and boundaries presents distinctive challenges to system design, system integration, and verification using failure mode avoidance (FMA).

Automotive Product Development organisations are challenged with ever increasing levels of systems complexity driven by the introduction of new technologies to address environmental concerns and enhance customer satisfaction within a highly competitive and cost conscious market. The technical difficulty associated with the engineering of complex automotive systems is compounded by the increase in sophistication of the control systems needed to manage the integration of technology packages. Most automotive systems have an electro-mechanical structure with control and software features embedded within the system. The conventional methods for design analysis and synthesis are engineering discipline focused (mechanical, electrical, electronic, control, software).