Fuzzy Risk Assessment in Occupational Health and Safety

Fuzzy risk assessment employs fuzzy logic to manage the inherent uncertainty and subjectivity in evaluating workplace hazards. By representing risk factors as degrees of membership rather than binary states, these methods accommodate imprecise expert judgments, linguistic terms and incomplete data. In occupational health and safety, fuzzy approaches have been integrated with multi-criteria decision-making tools—such as the Analytical Hierarchy Process and the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution—to prioritise risks across diverse sectors from construction and energy to emergency services. Hybrid frameworks often combine quantitative accident statistics with qualitative expert opinion, yielding a more robust safety management system. Applications range from assessing ergonomic stressors and toxic exposures to scheduling safety inspections and allocating limited resources for risk mitigation. Globally, fuzzy risk assessment supports regulators and safety managers by providing transparent, reproducible and adaptive models that can be updated as new data emerge. Case studies demonstrate its value in optimising intervention strategies, reducing incident rates and enhancing worker well-being.

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Fuzzy Risk Assessment in Occupational Health and Safety publication trend

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Technical terms

Fuzzy Set: A collection of elements with degrees of membership between zero and one, modelling ambiguous categories.

Fuzzy Logic: A form of reasoning that permits intermediate truth values, reflecting partial membership rather than binary outcomes.

Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (FAHP): A multi-criteria decision technique that integrates fuzzy logic with hierarchical weighting to prioritise risk factors.

Fuzzy Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (FTOPSIS): A method that ranks alternatives based on their fuzzy distance from an idealised optimal solution.

Fuzzy Delphi Method (FDM): An expert-consensus approach incorporating fuzzy scales to manage uncertainty in group judgements.

Proportional Risk Assessment Technique (PRAT): A quantitative tool that allocates risk proportions by combining likelihood and severity measures under constrained resources.

References

1. Occupational stressors among firefighters: application of multi-criteria decision making (MCDM)Techniques. Heliyon (2020).
2. Risk Assessment Using Fuzzy TOPSIS and PRAT for Sustainable Engineering Projects. Sustainability (2019).
3. A Decision Support Model for Prioritization of Regulated Safety Inspections Using Integrated Delphi, AHP and Double-Hierarchical TOPSIS Approach. IEEE Access (2020).
4. Occupational Risk Assessment of Wind Turbines in Bangladesh. Applied System Innovation (2022).