Improving occupational health and safety risk evaluation through decision analysis

Risk matrices (RMs) are extensively used for risk management, namely in occupational health and safety (OHS) settings, despite suffering from well-known methodological problems. The IRIS approach (improving RMs) proposes to overcome those problems throughout the construction of value RMs (VRMs) that shift the basis of risk analysis from probability versus impact to probability versus “impact value.” This article describes the real-world participatory process of building a VRM for an OHS unit. The complexity of the case required the enhancement of IRIS with soft mapping tools to structure the risk impact dimensions, the MACBETH-Choquet (where MACBETH is measuring attractiveness by a categorical based evaluation technique) procedure to model interdependent impacts, and a system of rules to risk probability assessment. A discussion on the model-building process is presented, namely addressing the cognitive burden imposed on the participants by different value elicitation procedures, which informed the design of a decision support system to assist the managers of the OHS unit in using the VRM.

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