Occupational Health and Safety Risk Assessment based on Combination Weighting and Uncertain Linguistic Information: Method Development and Application to a Construction Project

OCCUPATIONAL APPLICATIONS

Occupational hazards and work-related accidents are a substantial problem in countries around the world. Therefore, it is of great importance to develop appropriate techniques to assess and reduce the risk of occupational hazards. In many situations, however, exact data are inadequate to model real-life scenarios, because of the complexity of occupational health and safety (OHS) risk assessment problems. We present a new OHS risk assessment model to assess and rank the risk of occupational hazards based on combination weighting and uncertain linguistic information. Moreover, a practical example of a shopping mall construction project is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed model. The new model was found to provide a useful, practical, and flexible way for risk evaluation in OHS. In particular, it offered a new method for capturing domain expert opinions and prioritizing potential occupational hazards to improve the health and safety of workers.

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT

Background

OHS is an important issue, since it has great impact on the cost, productivity, and social reputation of a company. Occupational hazards have attracted considerable attention from both researchers and practitioners, because they can cause financial and personal loss as well as intangible damage within organizations and enterprises worldwide.

Purpose

Our aim was to develop a new model to assess and rank the risk of occupational hazards and identify high-risk ones for the promotion of occupational health.

Methods

The q-rung orthopair uncertain linguistic sets (q-ROULSs) are utilized to deal with uncertain risk assessment information provided by experts. An extended evaluation based on distance from average solution (EDAS) method is introduced to determine the risk priorities of occupational hazards. Moreover, a combination weighting method is adopted to derive the relative weights of risk criteria. A case study, involving a shopping mall construction project, was used to illustrate the applicability and validity of the proposed model.

Results

Ten occupational hazards were identified and, according to the proposed model, their risk priority scores were determined. From these scores, three hazards were determined as the most serious (i.e., collision with immobile objects or being struck by moving objects; fall of a person from height; and trapping, being crushed-inside or between objects). Conclusions: The proposed model was found to be a reliable and practical tool for the risk assessment of occupational hazards in OHS. It can depict the uncertain risk assessments of experts in a more prominent manner, and produce a reliable risk ranking of occupational hazards for corrective actions.

Keywords:

• Occupational health and safety
• uncertain linguistic set
• risk assessment
• combination weighting
• construction

Acknowledgments

The authors are very grateful to the editor and reviewers for their insightful and constructive comments and suggestions, which are very helpful in improving the quality of the paper.

Conflict of Interest

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 work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61773250), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. 22120200416).