International Journal of Industrial Engineering & Production Research

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Abstract Project management in construction industry, in many cases, is imperfect with respect to the integration of Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) risks. This imperfection exhibits itself as complications affecting the riskiness of industrial procedures and is illustrated usually by poor awareness of OHS within project teams. Difficulties on OHS regularly came about in the construction industry. The integration of OHS risk is not systematic in construction areas in spite of progressing laws and management systems. As project safety and risk evaluation in construction industry is an important issue, thus, the way on doing evaluation and liability of estimation is necessary. In this paper, we propose a new systematic approach based on Latin Hypercube Sampling (LHS) for integrating occupational health and safety into project risk evaluation. This approach tries to identify and evaluate reinforcement effects in a systematic approach for integrating OHS risks into project risk assessment. Furthermore, the proposed method allows evaluating and comparing OHS risks before and after the mitigation plan. A case study is used to prove the workability, credibility of the risk evaluation approach and uncomplicated integration of OHS risks at a construction project. This approach enables continual revaluation of criteria over the direction of the project or when new information is obtained. This model enables the decision makers such as project managers to integrate OHS risks toward schedule plan and compare them before and after the mitigation plan. The mentioned model is found to be useful for predicting OHS risks in construction industries and thus avoiding accidents over the path of the project.

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Introduction: This review article has tried to explore the economic effectiveness of ergonomics.
Methods: In this review, PubMed, EBSCO, and Web of Science were selected to find the related articles based on two keywords of ‘ergonomics’ and ‘economics’. Eleven full-text articles (1 in PubMed, 8 in EBSCO, and 2 in Web.Sci.) were included in the study.
Results: Articles show that ergonomics interventions have an association with economics and productivity; however 3 out of 11 articles didn’t show a clear interconnection between ergonomics and economic benefits. All of the reviewed articles conducted at workplaces and also were related to occupational ergonomics, but in a single case, the ergonomics product design was reflected a cost-benefit approach.
Discussion: The role of a healthy workforce and ergonomics design regard to both employees’ efficiency and business growth, are often neglected. According to reviewed papers, the role of ergonomics in green economics toward sustainability is inevitable. However, there are some challenges to persuade the industrial sectors’ managers about the economics side of ergonomics in which limited documents and the lack of ergonomics-economics models and procedures are critical.
Conclusion: This review emphasized on at least two approaches. One of them is the necessities of publishing papers, including valid economics model about industrial ergonomics, another one is to develop some economics tools to confirm the benefits of ergonomic product design. If some appropriate economic models or techniques merge into ergonomics intervention projects, whether industrial ergonomics or product design, more feasible and better outcomes will gain in which both of the employees and customers are satisfied.