An Approach to Diagnosing a Company’s Accident Prevention Status Using Budgets and Dynamic Programming Optimisation

Abstract Researchers have shown growing interest to accident prevention. Their outcomes have revealed that apart from the physical control efforts, management commitment to funds provision may as well stimulate enhanced safety prevention. While this call has been made in literature to consider the financial matters in safety, the key question about how this concern affects the machining industry remains unanswered. Despite having recognised hazards in a machine tool workshop, requires some financial resources for actions. In order to eliminate mishaps associated with lack of, or poor funds provision or delay to offer financial support to the shop floor when needed, proper analysis for the procedure of safety budget and implementation must be carried out. Drawing on the operations research literature, the dynamic programming technique is shown to optimally assign the right budget to each possible accident case that could occur in the company for prevention purposes. This research offers a path to optimal safety budget on the platform of budgets interaction with accident rate reduction. The optimization is carried out in line with minimum hazard flourishing policy and as well considering the positioning of the machines one to another and the functions of initiation, propagation and termination for the hazards. First, hazards are scouted for and classified using a suitable scale. Dynamic programming is then used to optimally distribute the budget of the company on accident prevention according to the scale that each hazard is classified. The validation of the approach was tested with data obtained from machine tools workshop located in Lagos, Nigeria. The work serves a useful purpose for safety engineers that pursue the efficient planning for operations.