Assessment of occupational risks from human health and environmental perspectives: a new integrated approach and its application using fuzzy BWM and fuzzy MAIRCA

Abstract

Occupational safety issues encountered in the worksite environment are the issues that companies should consider in improving their operations with a view to human health and environmental awareness. Many methods with different rationales have been existed in the literature to prioritize hazards according to their risk levels and to mitigate their consequences. In this study, a new model is developed for occupational risk assessment by merging two well-known multi-criteria decision-making methods named best and worst method (BWM) and multi attribute ideal real comparative analysis (MAIRCA) under fuzzy environment. The proposed model differentiates from other similar models by three aspects. First, it considers severity of a hazard and its associated risk from the human and environmental riskiness perspectives. Secondly, it applies fuzzy BWM (F-BWM) to calculate the relative importance of three risk factors named as "probability, frequency and severity" of traditional Fine-Kinney method. Thirdly, it applies fuzzy MAIRCA (F-MAIRCA) to rank hazards according to their risk level using importance values obtained by F-BWM. To show applicability of the approach, a case study of risk assessment in a marble factory is fulfilled. Additionally, a number of validation studies including benchmarking analysis with fuzzy VIKOR and fuzzy TOPSIS methods; a sensitivity analysis by varying importance weights of risk factors are carried out to highlight the solidity of the proposed approach.