Assessment of emergency risk management and resilience engineering at management levels of a high hazard industry

Abstract

The current study aimed to, firstly, assess the roles of crisis management systems, resilience engineering, and proactive risk management in emergency management of high-risk manufacturing industry and, secondly, to compute the relative contribution of each factor by the entropy approach. Data were collected using three questionnaires. The Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) was administered to rank study alternatives, which include managers at different hierarchical levels encompassing senior managers, middle‐level managers, and operating-level managers. The results of the entropy method considering crisis management data suggested that human and organisational aspects had the highest impact on emergency management. The highest percentages of influence considering resilience engineering factors were associated with flexibility and management commitment to safety. Among proactive risk management dimensions, training and communication about safety and risks were the most influential dimensions. TOPSIS results demonstrated that there are some gaps in the emergency management system of the plant from the operating managers’ perspectives. This means that operating managers believed that the emergency management system and resilience level should be improved in the plant to enhance the levels of safety and emergency risk management of the industry.

Keywords:

• Emergency management
• resilience engineering
• proactive risk management
• entropy
• TOPSIS

Acknowledgements

The authors would also like to thank the management of the study industry for their participation.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by Tabriz University of Medical Sciences [grant number: 65781; the ethical code: IR.TBZMED.REC.1399.716].

Notes on contributors

Leila Omidi

Leila Omidi is an assistant professor at the Department of Occupational Health Engineering, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Iran. Her research focuses on process safety, safety behaviour, and human factors influencing safety.

Hossein Karimi

Hossein Karimi holds an MSc in Health, Safety, and Environment (HSE) from Tabriz University of Medical Sciences, Iran. His research interests include organizational safety, occupational safety, and safety behavior.

Gholamreza Moradi

Gholamreza Moradi is an assistant professor at the Department of Occupational Health Engineering, Tabriz University of Medical Sciences, Iran. His research interests include occupational health and safety.