New Group Decision Making Model for Occupational Health and Safety Risk Assessment with Heterogeneous Linguistic Information

Occupational health and safety risk assessment (OHSRA) is a systematic and multidisciplinary activity for identifying, evaluating, and reducing the risks of occupational hazards at workplaces to protect employees from accidents. In practical OHSRA problems, domain experts tend to use linguistic terms to evaluate the risk of occupational hazards and the risk assessment information obtained is usually in heterogeneous forms due to their personalized and diversified expression habits. To address this challenge, this paper aims to propose a new OHSRA model based on the projection ranking by similarity to referencing vector (PRSRV) approach for the risk evaluation and prioritization of occupational hazards in a heterogeneous linguistic environment. To do so, the fuzzy linguistic approach, the hesitant fuzzy linguistic term set, and the probabilistic linguistic term set are used to represent experts’ heterogeneous risk assessment information. The PRSRV approach is utilized for the risk prioritization of occupational hazards based on their vectors and relative aggregate scores. In addition, the fuzzy-weighted with zero-inconsistency (FWZIC) method is extended and applied to obtain the importance weights of risk criteria. Finally, an example application of the proposed OHSRA model is presented to validate its effectiveness and advantages. The results show that the proposed OHSRA model can not only model the personalized heterogeneous linguistic risk evaluation information but also provide a reasonable risk ranking result of occupational hazards based on their relationships.