A new Model for Traceability Evaluation based on Cost-Benefits Analysis FMECA Principles and Fuzzy Sets Techniques

Quality Certification according to ISO9000 standards requires that firms have to be able to track every jobs, assembling steps, and equipment needful to realize each product. Another aspect of a traceability system is the possibility of the firm, for each type of product, to locate, on the market, every delivered ones on which analysis and/or corrective actions has to be made, due to an unconformity found on a certain component or on a certain job (customer-oriented traceability). This last feature can be able to give real advantages in terms of customer satisfaction, safety and firm image, therefore its establishment is often related to high costs due to the startup of dedicated procedures for parts identification, information systems, human resources, etc. The best choice, in this case is to submit to this type of traceability procedure a set of components that, from an analysis of the bill of materials, are recognized as critical in terms of certain predefined parameters such as security, cost, product functionality, etc. With this aim in this work we wish to give a practical decision supporting tool useful to identify, for an industrial product, which components have to be traced. In our prototype system the well known cost benefits analysis applied to the specific problem of product traceability, FMECA principles and fuzzy sets techniques have been implemented in a structured approach to find, inside the bill of materials, the optimal number of components that has to be underwent to this kind of traceability procedure.