IFMEA - Integration failure mode and effects analysis

During the product development process a lot of challenges have to be mastered. Beside ever shorter innovation cycles and time-to-market, products with increasing complexity such as mechatronic products lead to greater development risks. Mechatronic products are characterized by high functional as well as physical (e.g. spatial) integration. This integration of several modules (sub-systems) from different engineering disciplines entails a high risk of product failures. It is therefore crucial to systematically identify these risks already in early design stages. Therefore, it is important to realize that systems (sub-systems, system-elements, modules) are carriers of different physical effects. These effects not only realize the function of the system, but may sometimes have also undesired side effects which may lead to problems for other modules and, hence, have to be considered carefully. In this paper, the IFMEA (Integration Failure Mode and Effects Analysis) method is introduced, which is based on the widespread FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis) method, but has its focus on identifying problems due to the integration of several modules within mechatronic systems.