• Journal of Korean Society for Quality Management
• /
• v.46 no.2
• /
• pp.327-338
• /
• 2018

Purpose: A risk evaluation procedure is proposed for common failure causes in FMEA(Failure Mode and Effects Analysis). The conventional FMEA does not provide a proper means to compare common failure causes with other failure causes. This research aims to develop a risk evaluation procedure in FMEA where common failure causes and other failure causes exist together. Methods: For each common failure cause, the effect of each combination of its resulting failures is recommended to be reevaluated considering their interactive worsening effect. And the probability that each combination of failures is incurred by the same common cause is also considered. Based on these two factors, the severity of each common cause is determined. Other procedures are similar to the conventional method. Results: The proposed procedure enables to compare and prioritize every failure cause. Thus, the common causes, each of which incurring two or more failures, and other causes, each of which is corresponding to one failure, can be fairly compared. Conclusion: A fair and proper way of comparing the common failure causes and other causes is provided. The procedure is somewhat complicated and requires more works to do. But it is worth to do.

• International conference on construction engineering and project management
• /
• 2009.05a
• /
• pp.184-189
• /
• 2009

In 2008 the total estimated failure costs in the Netherlands was estimated to be 11.4% of the industry's turnover compared to 7.7% seven years earlier. Failure costs can be the consequence of rework as a result of failure to conform to the product requirements and specifications or due to inefficient processes and bad management practices. Many construction companies however are unaware of the exact nature of these costs, their root causes or how to control them. This paper describes work carried out in the Netherlands to identify the different types of failure costs in construction and their root causes. The research described builds on previous findings by another research institution and expands it to include information collected from project cases and a survey of a number of project managers in the construction industry. The paper describes the analysis of the results from cases and the survey to identify the root causes of failure costs. Research shows, for example, that many failure costs are related to the client taking late decisions and making changes to the project requirements.

• Journal of Applied Reliability
• /
• v.11 no.4
• /
• pp.387-398
• /
• 2011

$217Plus^{TM}$, a newly developed as a surrogate of the MIL-HDBK-217, may be widely applied for reliability predictions of electronic systems. In this study, we performed sensitivity study of the $217Plus^{TM}$ system model to various parameters. Specific attention was put to logistics model and its behavior has been examined in terms of non-component failure causes. We first briefly explained the $217Plus^{TM}$ methodology with system level failure rate evaluation. We then applied experimental designs with several failure causes as factors. We used an orthogonal array with three levels of each parameter. Our results indicate that cannot duplicate, induced, and wear-out causes have dominant effects on the system failures and design, parts, and system management have much less but a little strong effects. The results in this study not only figure out the behavior of the predicted failure rate as functions of failure causes but provide meaningful guidelines for practical applications.

• Proceedings of the Korean Geotechical Society Conference
• /
• 2005.10a
• /
• pp.140-153
• /
• 2005

During the tunnel construction the major failure mode can be categorized as: tunnel failure just after the tunnel excavation without support, failure after application of shotcrete and finally failure after setting the concrete lining. The failure mode just after the tunnel excavation without support, can be further classified as : bench failure, crown failure, face failure, full face failure, failure due to weak strata and failure due to overburden. Moreover the failure after application of shotcrete is classified as heading face failure, settlement of shotcrete support, local failure of shotcrete lining and invert shotcrete. To find out the major causes of tunnel collapse, the investigation was done in case of the second phase of Seoul subway construction. The investigation results depicted that the major causes of tunnel collapse were due to the weak layer of rock/fault and sudden influx of ground water from the tunnel crown. While the investigation results of the mountain road tunnels construction have shown that the major causes of tunnel failure were inadequate analysis of tunnel face mapping results, intersection of faults and limestone cavities. In this paper some recent measurement in order to mitigate such tunnel collapse are presented

• Journal of Engineering Education Research
• /
• v.13 no.2
• /
• pp.74-77
• /
• 2010

This article proposes to examine how the study of failure differs from other technical subjects, and how to turn failure experiences to one's advantage. The authors surveyed the properties of failures in PBL (Project Based Learning) and also examined students' interest and understanding of failure, after introducing failure examples. To investigate how students communicate failure experiences to third parties, reports of the failure experience in PBL were evaluated. From above mentioned surveys, we get the following results. The typical causes of failure in educational institutions are lack of skill in manufacturing and inadequate planning, which conversely are minor causes of failure in the industry. A knowledge database on failure, employed commonly in industry, is not effective in PBL, because projects in educational institutes are usually changed every year. Case studies in failure can be approached from many points of view including causes, processes, effects and safety measures. While teachers should emphasize the notable points in the failure examples in introducing examples of specific topics in machine design, teachers should explain the multiple aspects in the failure examples to educate students about the complexity of actual accidents.

• Proceedings of the Korean Reliability Society Conference
• /
• 2011.06a
• /
• pp.257-264
• /
• 2011

In this study, we performed sensitivity study of the $217Plus^{TM}$ system model to various parameters. Specific attention was put to logistics model and its behavior has been examined in terms of non-component failure causes. We first briefly explained the $217Plus^{TM}$ methodology with system level failure rate evaluation. We then applied experimental designs with several failure causes as factors. We used an orthogonal array with three levels of each parameter. Our results indicate that cannot duplicate, induced, and wear-out causes have dominant effects on the system failures and design, parts, and system management have much less but a little strong effects. The results in this study not only figure out the behavior of the predicted failure rate as functions of failure causes but provide meaningful guidelines for practical applications.

• Journal of the Korean Home Economics Association
• /
• v.43 no.7 s.209
• /
• pp.159-170
• /
• 2005

The purpose of this study was to investigate the causes of managerial failure in small apparel retailers by using the qualitative research method. The study was performed by interviews from thirteen owners/managers who experienced failure as small apparel retailers from November 2003 to February 2004. The causes of failure in the small apparel businesses were human related problems, marketing strategy problems, marketing mix, weak managerial ability, and business environment related problems. Of special interest was causes such as incomplete legal documents with franchisers, unexpected tax investigation from the office of National Tax Administration(NTA), sexual discrimination for women owners, and incapable risk management. It is interesting to note that tax investigation by NTA and sexual discrimination in the business custom were shown as the main causes of business failure in Korea.

• Journal of Korean Institute of Industrial Engineers
• /
• v.21 no.4
• /
• pp.609-628
• /
• 1995

This paper presents a reliability model and a data-analytic procedure for a repairable unit subject to failures due to multiple non-identifiable causes. We regard a failure cause as a state and assume the life distribution for each cause to be exponential. Then we represent the dependency among the causes by a Markov switching model(MSM) and estimate the transition probabilities and failure rates by maximum likelihood(ML) method. The failure data are incomplete due to masked causes of failures. We propose a specific version of EM(expectation and maximization) algorithm for finding maximum likelihood estimator(MLE) under this situation. We also develop statistical procedures for determining the number of significant states and for testing independency between state transitions. Our model requires only the successive failure times of a unit to perform the statistical analysis. It works well even when the causes of failures are fully masked, which overcomes the major deficiency of competing risk models. It does not require the assumption of stationarity or independency which is essential in mixture models. The stationary probabilities of states can be easily calculated from the transition probabilities estimated in our model, so it covers mixture models in general. The results of simulations show the consistency of estimation and accuracy gradually increasing according to the difference of failure rates and the frequency of transitions among the states.

• Proceedings of the Korean Geotechical Society Conference
• /
• 2009.03a
• /
• pp.1154-1160
• /
• 2009

Cut slope failure is happened in various form by several causes. In this study, we searched causes of cut slope failure shortly, and we made a study of slope failure by excessive under cut. Under cutting slope does to add unstability. Thereby, cut slope failure can be happened on a large scale.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• v.51 no.3
• /
• pp.709-718
• /
• 2019

The international nuclear industry has undergone a lot of changes since the Fukushima, Chernobyl and TMI nuclear power plant accidents. However, there are still large and small component deficiencies at nuclear power plants in the world. There are many causes of electrical equipment defects. There are also factors that cause component failures due to human errors. This paper analyzed the root causes of failure and types of human error in 300 cases of electrical component failures. We analyzed the operating experience of electrical components by methods of root causes in K-HPES (Korean-version of Human Performance Enhancement System) and by methods of human error types in HuRAM+ (Human error-Related event root cause Analysis Method Plus). As a result of analysis, the most electrical component failures appeared as circuit breakers and emergency generators. The major causes of failure showed deterioration and contact failure of electrical components by human error of operations management. The causes of direct failure were due to aged components. Types of human error affecting the causes of electrical equipment failure are as follows. The human error type group I showed that errors of commission (EOC) were 97%, the human error type group II showed that slip/lapse errors were 74%, and the human error type group III showed that latent errors were 95%. This paper is meaningful in that we have approached the causes of electrical equipment failures from a comprehensive human error perspective and found a countermeasure against the root cause. This study will help human performance enhancement in nuclear power plants. However, this paper has done a lot of research on improving human performance in the maintenance field rather than in the design and construction stages. In the future, continuous research on types of human error and prevention measures in the design and construction sector will be required.