How MADE's flow failure-mode bands work

Every flow property in MADE's taxonomy (see made-flow-taxonomy-energy.md, made-flow-taxonomy-material.md, made-flow-taxonomy-signal.md) ships with five standard failure modes: Very High, High, Nominal, Low, Very Low. Reading MADE's internal data file directly (not documented anywhere on Siemens Support Center or PHM Technology's public site) shows these are not five arbitrary labels — they are backed by a single, fixed quantitative model reused across nearly every property in the entire taxonomy.

The normalized response scale

Each flow property's value is normalized onto a single continuous scale from -1.0 to 1.0, and split into five fixed bands:

Failure mode	Range	Trivalent code
Very High	0.75 to 1.0	+2
High	0.25 to 0.75	+1
Nominal	-0.25 to 0.25	0
Low	-0.75 to -0.25	-1
Very Low	-1.0 to -0.75	-2

This exact five-band split (with these exact boundary values) appears essentially unchanged across all ~230+ flow properties in the taxonomy — of roughly 940 failure-mode entries checked, only these five band definitions occur, each roughly 230+ times. It is a universal normalization, not a per-property tuning.

Why this matters

This is the quantitative half of the taxonomy concept introduced in functional-basis-taxonomy.md and ffip-framework.md: those documents describe function health states (Healthy/Degraded/Lost/No Flow) as a qualitative framework. MADE's actual implementation is more granular — a five-level, signed deviation scale (Very Low / Low / Nominal / High / Very High), which collapses naturally onto the qualitative Healthy (Nominal) vs. Degraded (High/Low) vs. Lost (Very High/Very Low, in effect) picture, but carries an explicit magnitude and direction that the purely qualitative FFIP/functional-basis framing does not.

Each FAILUREMODE entry in the source data also carries a faultId, used elsewhere in MADE to link a specific out-of-band flow value to a named fault in the system's Failure Concept taxonomy (see made-standardized-taxonomy-live-ui-screenshots.md for the Failure Concepts tree) — i.e., the quantitative band a flow property falls into is the mechanical trigger that associates a failure mode with a specific real-world fault cause during failure propagation.

Limitation

The nominal="true" attribute always marks the middle (Nominal) band; the other four bands are always nominal="false". No properties were found with a different band count or different thresholds, but this was verified only for the standard flow taxonomy shipped with MADE 3.9.1's help data — custom or user-extended libraries could in principle define different bands.