A multicriteria knapsack approach to economic optimization of industrial safety measures

Abstract The selection of safety measures to be applied in an industrial plant to reduce risk to an acceptable level is a critical task for safety engineers. However, to select a portfolio of safety measures is quite hard as a number of different hazards have to be counteracted simultaneously and a wide range of preventive or protective measures can be chosen, including either technical, administrative and managerial actions, within the constraints of a given budget. In this paper a multi-criteria “knapsack” model is described to help safety analysts in selecting the most cost-effective safety measures to be adopted. The problem is formulated as that of maximizing the utility of the portfolio of safety measures subject to a number of constraints including a maximum allowable budget. In the paper at first the problem formulation is given as a knapsack model, then the approach to compute the utility level of a given portfolio of safety measure is described utilizing a multi-criteria method. Finally, an application example is presented and the advantages and disadvantages of the method are discussed.