Occupational risk assessment in construction industry – Overview and reflection

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Occupational risk assessment in construction industry – Overview and reflection
Abel Pinto a,⇑, Isabel L. Nunes a, Rita A. Ribeiro b
a Universidade Nova Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia, Departamento de Engenharia Mecânica e Industrial, Campus de Caparica, 2829-516 Caparica, Portugal
b Centro de Tecnologia e Sistemas, UNINOVA, Campus de Caparica, 2829-516 Caparica, Portugal
a r t i c l e i n f o
Article history:
Received 6 October 2009
Received in revised form 23 November 2010
Accepted 8 January 2011
Available online 18 February 2011
Keywords:
Occupational risk assessment
Safety
Construction industry
Fuzzy sets
a b s t r a c t
The construction industry is plagued by occupational risky situations and poor working conditions. Occupational
risk assessment (ORA) on workplace sites is the first and key step to achieve adequate safety levels,
particularly to support decision-making in safety programs. Most construction safety efforts are
applied informally under the premise that simply allocating more resources to safety management will
improve safety on site. Moreover, there are many traditional methods to address ORA, but few have been
adapted and validated for use in the construction industry, particularly in the design stage, for which traditional
approaches do not give adequate answers. This paper presents a state-of-the-art on ORA traditional
methods, for the construction industry, discussing their limitations and pointing advantages of
using fuzzy sets approaches to deal with ill-defined situations.

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