Facilitating FMEA investigation of industrial systems during basic engineering with RAMI 4.0

Production systems are becoming increasingly complex, as they have to be used to manufacture individualized products with the highest quality. In addition, rapidly changing customer requirements mean production systems are adapted at shorter intervals or designed to be highly flexible right from the start. With increased complexity, the risk of failures in production also rises. Since most failures are associated with high costs, the goal is to avoid them as efficiently and effectively as possible. Hazards identified in an early phase of the design process can be treated directly, and thus time and costs are reduced. For this reason, this paper aims to enable the evaluation of production systems with the Failure Mode & Effects Analysis (FMEA) during the basic design phase of the engineering life-cycle. To do so, the proposed model-based system quality analysis for basic engineering (SQA4BE) approach is implemented in a state-of-the-art software tool targeting model-based systems engineering (MBSE) of such systems, the so-called Reference Architecture Model Industrie 4.0 (RAMI 4.0) Toolbox. The resulting implementation of the approach is evaluated towards practicability by utilizing the example case study of a Fischertechnik screwing machine.