Using intuitionistic fuzzy sets for fault-tree analysis on printed circuit board assembly

Fault-tree analysis (FTA) is a powerful technique used to identify the root causes of undesired event in system failure by constructing a tree of sub-events, spreading into bottom events, procreating the fault and finally heading to the top event. From integrating expert's knowledge and experience in terms of providing the possibilities of failure of bottom events, an algorithm of the intuitionistic fuzzy fault-tree analysis is proposed in this paper to calculate fault interval of system components and to find the most critical system component for the managerial decision-making based on some basic definitions. The proposed method is applied for the failure analysis problem of printed circuit board assembly (PCBA) to generate the PCBA fault-tree, fault-tree nodes, then directly compute the intuitionistic fuzzy fault-tree interval, traditional reliability, and the intuitionistic fuzzy reliability interval. The result of this proposed method is compared with the existing approaches of fault-tree methods. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.