Customised risk assessment in manufacturing: A step towards the future of occupational safety management

Following the enforcement of the EEC Directive (1989), focused on the promotion of workers health and safety, several approaches have been developed in the last 30 years to assess the risks related to the different hazards in the work environment and to identify, based on this assessment process, measures and action to promote safety and to reduce the occupational accidents. These approaches generally are focused on the analysis of the working activity and neglect the influence of the worker characteristics involved, strongly limiting the effectiveness of the risk-based decision making. This has a particular relevance in manufacturing field, where workers are still widely employed in several tasks, despite an increasing processes automation. Within this paper an innovative approach to explicitly consider the individual characteristic of the workers within the risk assessment in the work environment is described. Integration of a Human Performance model within risk assessment process is thus proposed. The resulting method allowed the definition of a customized risk based both on the individual skill of the worker involved and on the characteristics of the work places The comparison between risk assessed with traditional method and the customized risk showed the relevant influence that the human performance may have on the risk level to which the workers are exposed to and consequently allowed the company to identify the need for technical and organisational prevention and protection measures not highlighted with the more traditional approach. This method was applied for validation to an assembly line of a heavy vehicles manufacturing plant. The impact on the risk assessment is here shown and discussed, while the results in terms of safety at the workplace are still in the phase of data collection and will be published in future work. This model represents a step into the future of safety as a precursor of a more general process of customization at the individual level that is ongoing in several branches from the precision and personalized medicine (Duarte and Spencer, 2016) to the individual financial and marketing methods (Matz and Netzer, 2017).