FMEA is an effective reliability analysis method for identifying potential failure modes in a system and evaluating their criticality. Conventional FMEA has many shortcomings such as not considering the weights of different risk factors

RPN being very sensitive to changes in risk factors

difficulty in handling expert subjective scoring information

and not considering the propagation and impact relationships between failure modes. Aiming at these shortcomings

an improved FMEA method was proposed by introducing house of reliability

rough set theory and VIKOR method to improve the accuracy and objectivity of risk priority analysis of failure modes.Compared with the conventional FMEA

the improved FMEA can not only effectively deal with the various subjectivities and uncertainties in the risk assessment process but also rank the risk of the identified failure modes with taking into account the effects of failure propagation

which is able to rank the risk priority of failure modes in the case of attribute conflict and various uncertainties. Based on the proposed FMEA

a real-word application of risk priority ranking of the failure modes in wind turbine was carried out and the risk priority order of each failure mode and each subsystem were obtained. According to the ranking results

the weak links and key subsystems of the reliability of wind turbine were identified

and the hazard weight of each failure mode and subsystem was given

which can provide data support for the reliability optimization design of wind turbine.