Fuzzy Reasoning Approach (FRA) for Assessment of Workers Safety in Manganese Mines

Safety management today is an important element in the mining industry with advancement in sociotechnical complexity in mining systems/operations. One of the most important components of safety management is to maintain safety of workers in the workplace, as this in turn affects the safety of the whole work system. The safety of workers depends on various factors and these factors affect workplace safety simultaneously. So to evaluate the same, a robust holistic approach with potential to exploit uncertain safety-related data and give close to perfect outcome is desired. This paper presents the fuzzy reasoning approach (FRA) to perform assessment of risk associated with workers’ safety specifically in mining industry. Initially, factors affecting worker safety are identified, weighted with fuzzy triangular numbers, since the factors have nonphysical structures and fuzzy numbers aid computational ease. Thereafter, fuzzy inference system with expert decisions is developed. As a result, the level of risk associated with the combination of factors comprising the working environment for the worker can be identified and reduced to considerable levels.