Occupational health and safety risk assessment using an integrated SWARA-MABAC model under bipolar fuzzy environment

Occupational health and safety (OHS) is a systemic and multidisciplinary activity for anticipating, recognizing, evaluating and controlling the hazards that may impair the health of workers. Risk assessment of hazards plays a critical role in the OHS. However, due to the vagueness and uncertainty of information, it is difficult for experts to express their opinions with crisp numbers in the risk assessment process. In this paper, we present a new OHS model, which integrates bipolar fuzzy sets (BFSs) and multi-attributive border approximation area comparison (MABAC) method, for the risk assessment of occupational hazards. Specifically, the BFSs are utilized to deal with the vague and uncertain assessment information of hazards provided by experts and the MABAC method is used to determine the risk ranking of hazards. Moreover, we extend the stepwise weight assessment ratio analysis (SWARA) method with BFSs to obtain the weights of risk criteria. Finally, the occupational hazard risk assessment example on construction sites is conducted and a comparative analysis is performed to verify the effectiveness and availability of our proposed OHS model. The results show that the new integrated model provides a more effective and practical method for the risk prioritization of occupational hazards in OHS.