An improved alternative queuing method for occupational health and safety risk assessment and its application to construction excavation

摘要

Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) is a systematic and interdisciplinary activity to identify, analyze and reduce the potential safety and health hazards of workers caused by the activities in workplace. When dealing with an OHS risk analysis problem, how to assess the risk of occupational hazards is a crucial step and a big challenge. In this paper, we aim to develop a new OHS risk assessment model by integrating Picture Fuzzy Sets (PFSs) and Alternative Queuing Method (AQM) to assess and rank the risk of occupational hazards for corrective actions. To this end, the PFSs are utilized to address the vague and uncertain assessment information provided by experts and an improved AQM is introduced to acquire the risk priority of the recognized occupational hazards. Furthermore, we extend the Best Worst Method (BWM) to derive the relative weights of risk criteria based on picture fuzzy information. Finally, a practical example of excavation in a construction yard is provided to illustrate the feasibility and superiority of our proposed OHS risk assessment model. The results indicate that the new risk assessment method is able to produce more reliable risk ranking results of occupational hazards, and provides a practical and effective way for risk analysis in OHS.