Risk assessment of occupational safety in construction projects using uncertain information

Abstract

Uncertainties are always involved in construction projects, and most on-site assessments rely on qualitative data to determine the level of risk to which workers are exposed. Furthermore, the majority of legal documents for companies and statistical data are inadequate for risk analysis. This aspect enhances the uncertainty of the worksite circumstances. This research aims to propose a novel approach in a fuzzy environment to consider the uncertainties and interdependencies for the risk assessment of occupational safety in construction projects. Occupational safety risk factors (OSRFs) are identified using an expert panel. An extended decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) with interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy numbers is integrated with the Choquet integral to obtain robust interdependencies between OSRFs. Then, the extended technique for order preference by similarity to the ideal solution (TOPSIS) method with the intuitionistic fuzzy set (IFs) is applied to obtain the priorities of OSRFs. Moreover, an intuitionistic fuzzy weighted average (IFWA) operator is employed to integrate the individual judgments of experts for ranking the degree of importance of OSRFs. Eventually, the sensitivity analysis is conducted and the robustness and validity of results from the suggested approach are verified.

KEYWORDS:

• Risk assessment
• occupational safety
• construction projects
• uncertain information

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported in part by the Ministry of Science and Technology of China under Grant 2020AAA0108400 and Grant 2020AAA0108402 and Grant 2020AAA0108404 and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under Grant 71825007, in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under Grant 72210107001.