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Abstract
This paper presents a novel approach based upon the dempster Shafer theory of evidence to prioritize the various failure modes under the epistemic environment. The potential failures in equipment can be examined by a failure mode effect analysis approach. The FMEA approach prioritizes (Rank) the various failure modes based upon the risk priority number which depends upon three factors viz severity, occurrence, and detection of failure. This approach uses the group-based consensus to reach a particular value that is subjective in nature. Thus, the result obtained is not realistic. To address this issue, we attempted to consider the epistemic uncertainty involved in the data to rank various failure modes of the equipment. A numerical illustration is provided to explain the proposed methodology.