Towards the development of a comprehensive hybrid fuzzy-based occupational risk assessment model for construction workers.

Highlights • A comprehensive hybrid fuzzy-based occupational risk assessment model for the construction workers is developed. • All the crucial stages of a complete assessment approach are prudently taken into consideration. • A comprehensive step-by-step risk identification approach is proposed. • The proposed method for analyzing the identified risks is proved to produce very consistent and accurate results. • The adoption of suitable treatments for the pertinent risks is viable. • The robustness of the proposed assessment model is verified through its application to a real-life case study. Abstract Although some studies have focused on assessing the related risks to the workers involved in the construction activities, the developed models hitherto are tangled with some shortfalls, including unstructured ways of risks identification, low consistency and accuracy of the used analysis methods, and paucity of prudent evaluation strategies. These shortcomings lead to taking imprudent and inappropriate mitigative actions. As such, a Comprehensive Hybrid Fuzzy-based Occupational Risk Assessment Model (CHFORAM) is developed in this paper to systematically identify, analyze, and evaluate the risks to which the construction workers are exposed. The application of the developed CHFORAM to a real-life case study was observed to have the following contributions: obtaining a detailed list of critical risks posing danger to the workers in a stepwise manner, obviating the need for having statistical data associated with incompletion and uncertainty, analyzing the identified risks with improved consistency and accuracy, proposing the effective treatment strategies to deal with the risks, and providing future plans for dealing with the risks at post-treatment stage. The application of CHFORAM to any projects can guide the safety inspectors and managers in taking the further jauntier mitigative actions, leading to the improvement in safety and health of the involved workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]