Quantitative assessment of working conditions in the workplace

Indicators, different in terms of nature and grading scales, are used to recognise hazardous and harmful factors that affect human health. However, no single methodology is available for their assessment, and the variety of qualimetric assessment methods requires in-depth research, in part on optimality and efficiency. Therefore, this work aimed to conduct several scientific studies to obtain the results of the assessment in unified units of measurement, which would provide a generalised indicator of harmful factors at the workplace. The article proposes to use dependencies to assess indicators of harmful factors, considering the maximum, minimum, and optimal values as well as the shape parameter, the change of which produces various assessments in a dimensionless scale. A hierarchy analysis method was used to obtain reliable values with a small number of experts and determine the form parameter. These efforts resulted in the value of the overall index for harmful factors, which serves as grounds for decisions regarding further improvements in working conditions. The developed methodology was used to assess the safety of working conditions at a machine-building enterprise, and the results are presented in the article. © 2020 Olena Cherniak et al., published by Sciendo 2020.