A proposed occupational health and safety risk estimation tool for manufacturing systems

There are numerous hazards to be found in almost any workplace. Annually, millions of workers die, are injured or become ill as a result of these occupational hazards. Industrial machines are often involved in these occupational accidents. Because of the demands of regulatory compliance, and the potentially high cost in terms of human suffering and lost production, businesses should place particular emphasis on safety measures. Risk is defined as a combination of the probability of harm and the severity of its consequences. Generally, risk estimation involves examining the hazards associated with a situation or with the use of a machine. A large number of techniques have been proposed for risk estimation, and recent studies have revealed that some of them have serious flaws. The main objective of this paper is to develop a proposed risk assessment tool based on the findings of an earlier study. Our research results constitute a first step towards the integration of occupational health and safety (OHS) concerns into facility planning models which traditionally do not consider OHS. The proposed risk estimation tool is developed based on the characteristics, strengths and weaknesses of 31 existing risk estimation tools, and is then applied to 20 scenarios representing different hazardous situations. To evaluate the performance of the proposed tool, the results were compared with those of other risk estimation tools and confirmed its proposed ability to estimate risk relative to other risk estimation tools.