Occupational health and safety risk assessment in the domain of Industry 4.0

Abstract

The objectives of this study were three-fold: (i) to investigate new occupational health and safety risks that may arise with the integration of Industry 4.0 in production environments; (ii) to identify and group these risks into various categories; and (iii) to prioritize these groups. With this prioritization, a number of recommendations will be made to take into account new risk groups that may arise during the reorganizing of production environments according to Industry 4.0. This study used the Hesitant Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process prioritization approach to determine the ranking of risks, which arose with the use of Industry 4.0. In this paper, possible occupational health and safety risks of the selected method consisted of eye-related disorders, mental fatigue, disorders stemming from the static working position, exposure to unknown dangerous particles as a result of cooperation with robots, and psychological pressure (stemming from the problems of adaptation to duties that require creativity). According to the results, the two most important risk factors were mental fatigue and psychological pressure. Mental fatigue as the principal risk factor was not unexpected owing to the many encounters between humans and machines. However, with respect to psychological pressure, we were unable interpret the results in the same way as the mental fatigue case. Psychological pressure is a complicated problem, and a more in-depth and detailed investigation is needed.