Use of the DMAIC Approach to Identify Root Cause of Circuit Breaker Failure

The DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Implement and Control) approach is a well-established approach used to improve industrial processes and products. The DMAIC approach is mostly used as part of quality assurance processes, but this paper will show that it can be applied to investigation of root cause analysis of equipment failure. Specifically, the piece of equipment under investigation is a circuit breaker used in a distribution system. A second contribution of this paper is to provide suggestions on approaches to overcome modeling challenges related to lack of data, both in terms of measurements and in terms of system parameters.