ITEM TOOLKIT

Chapter 6 FMECA 131
CHAPTER 6
FMECA
The FMECA program is documented by the standard originally developed by the United States Military, MIL-STD-1629,
Procedures for Performing a Failure Mode, Effects and Criticality Analysis, dated November 9, 1949. This procedure was
developed as a reliability technique to determine the effect of system and equipment failures.
The FMECA module also now covers, and conforms fully to, the standards IEC 61508 and ISO 26262. This enables ITEM
ToolKit to provide a full top-down modeling from Hazard Analysis to FMECA in compliance with these standards.
This chapter:
1. Introduces FMECA systems
2. Describes ToolKit’s FMECA features
3. Outlines an example FMECA system
4. Describes the FMECA Editor Screen, Toolbars and Shortcut Keys
1. Introduction
A Failure Mode, Effects, and Criticality Analysis (FMECA) uses an inductive approach to system design and reliability. It
identifies each potential failure within a system or manufacturing process and uses severity classifications to show the
potential hazards associated with these failures.
There are two approaches to performing a FMECA:
• The functional approach is applied in projects containing hardware components that cannot be uniquely identified. In
this scenario, the sub-system functions are weighed in terms of their function within the system.
• The hardware approach is applied in projects containing hardware components that can be uniquely identified.
A FMECA is usually applied in two steps:
• Identifying failure modes and their effects (FMEA).
• Ranking failure modes according to the combination of severity and the probability of that failure mode occurring
(Criticality Analysis).