Safety and Health at Work

Occupational Safety and Health Research Institute, Korea Occupational Safety and Health Agency (산업안전보건연구원)
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A Hierarchical Solution Approach for Occupational Health and Safety Inspectors' Task Assignment Problem

  • Arikan, Feyzan (Faculty of Engineering, Department of Industrial Engineering, Gazi University) ;
  • Sozen, Songul K. (Ministry of Labour and Social Security, Labour Inspection Board)
  • Received : 2020.02.06
  • Accepted : 2021.01.14
  • Published : 2021.06.30
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Abstract

Background: Occupational health and safety (OHS) is a significant interest of all governments to prevent workplace hazards. Although appropriate legislation and regulations are essentials for the protection of workers, they are solely not enough. Application of them in practice should be secured by an efficient inspection system. Fundamental components of an inspection system are inspectors and their audit tasks. Maintaining the fair balanced task assignment among inspectors strictly enhances the efficiency of the overall system. Methods: This study proposes a two-phased goal programming approach for OHS inspectors' task assignments and presents a case study. Results: The solution approach gives the balanced assignment of inspectors to the workplaces in different cities of the country in the planning period. The obtained schedule takes into account the distances covered by the work places and the number of the workplaces' employees to be audited and pays attention to the human factors by considering the preferences of the inspectors. The comparisons between the obtained optimal schedule and the implemented one that is produced manually show that the approach not only maintains the technical requirements of the problem, but also provides social and physical balance to the task assignment. Conclusion: Both the approach and the application study are expected to offer fruitful inspirations in the area of safety management and policy and they provide a good guide for social policy and organizational aspects in the field of OHS inspectors' task assignment.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

As the authors, we would like to express our sincere appreciation to anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and the fruitful ideas to enhance the quality of the manuscript.

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