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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.

This paper introduces a function failure approach to Fault Tree Analysis (FFTA) and illustrates its application through an automotive case study. The methodology is structured and straightforward to use. It is argued that the FFTA methodology integrates and interconnects well with other failure mode avoidance tools in common use in the automotive engineering design, such as FMEA and P-Diagram. FFTA shares the same platform for function based system analysis as other analysis tools and delivers complementary information

This paper presents an approach to product design and development based on function failure avoidance, using of series of well known engineering tools including Function Fault Tree Analysis, P-Diagram and Design Verification. A 4-step function failure mode avoidance process is presented. The use of the engineering tools in an integrated and synergistic manner to achieve robust and reliable product design is illustrated by considering information flow within an automotive case study. The central role of FMEA within the process is described. The authors’ experience of using the process is discussed.

The quality of the output generated by a team is directly influenced by how well the team works together. Despite the complexity of the team system, within a typical Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) project the consideration given to the team process is often disproportionately small in comparison to that paid to the technical aspects of the project. This paper presents an efficient approach to teamwork within an engineering design context such as a DFSS project, in which team skills are modelled on DFSS technical processes allowing team members to learn both technical and teamwork skills within the common context of the technical process. DFSS engineering tools used within the framework of Failure Mode Avoidance are used to identify key potential failure modes in the team process and their effects and causes. A series of effective and efficient countermeasures to the team process failure modes are introduced as straight forward and easy to use interlinking teamwork tools.