A review about methods for supporting failure risks analysis in eco-assessment

Abstract

This paper critically reviewed 106 scientific papers proposing methods to enrich eco-assessment with failure determination and risk assessment. The provided research perspective is new and significantly different from the reviews in the literature which are mostly limited to analyse the environmental impacts of uncertainties and off-design functioning rather than the failures. The analysis, based on the contributions of the literature over more than 20 years, was carried out manually and allowed to identify and classify the application fields, the types of identifiable failures and the approaches used for their determination, for the analysis of their risk of occurrence and for their eco-assessment. The different classifications have also been intersected with each other and all the proposed approaches have been discussed in detail, highlighting the advantages and disadvantages in relation to eco-assessment. From the study emerged a growing and heterogeneous interest on the subject by the scientific community, and a certain independence of the analysed methods with respect to traditional approaches of both failure risk analysis and eco-assessment. Great attention of the methods about product functioning has been highlighted, in addition to the use of tests, simulations, FMEA (failure mode and effect analysis)-based approaches and knowledge databases to determine the failures, while statistical methods are preferred to support risks analysis and LCA (life cycle assessment) for environmental impact calculation. If, in the coming years, this argument also spreads in industry, the results provided by this review could be exploited as a first framework for practitioners.

Keywords: FMEA; Failure determination; Life cycle assessment (LCA); Risk analysis.

Fig. 1

(left) Time distribution (number of publications) and (right) fields of application of the collected methods

Fig. 2

Classification of the failures identified by the considered methods according to the addressed items and product life cycle phases (where “Manuf.” = Manufacturing)

Fig. 3

(left) Distributions of the failure determination approaches and (right) number of intersections between them within the considered documents

Fig. 4

left) Distribution of risk analysis approaches and (right) numbers of their intersections within the analysed documents

Fig. 5

(left) Distribution of impact assessment modalities in the considered methods and (right) comparison with failure determination approaches and risk assessment approaches

Fig. 6

Classification of the methods and tool in the reviews of Sutrisno and Lee (2011), Spreafico et al. (2017) and the current one

Fig. 7

Classifications of methods and tools for failure determination and risk assessment in Spreafico et al. (2017) and in this review

Fig. 8

Classification of the methods and tool in Bamber et al. (2020) and in our review