Risk Management in Product Development

Risk management in product development is an essential component in ensuring safer product operation, using methods to identify and prevent early failures. In product development, it is therefore used primarily in the very early stages of the development process in order to specifically prevent failure mechanisms before they are even “developed” into the product. 
The main methods used are FTA (Fault Tree Analysis), which systematically identifies all potentially critical failure mechanisms based on the functional and system structure, and FMEA (Failure Mode and Effect Analysis), which evaluates the identified failure mechanisms in terms of their significance (severity of the failure consequence), probability of occurrence, and probability of detection.  
At the institute, risk management methods are used in research projects for the targeted identification of unknown failure mechanisms and their triggers. They are also used in industrial collaborations for reliability-based product optimization.