Multi-Criteria Assessment of Ergonomic Conditions of Work. Case Study

Abstract

Abstract The supervision of OHS conditions (working conditions and the realization of work tasks) is one of the basic obligations of the employer. The number and variety of describing elements (and thus being subject to assessment) means that synthetic measures (measures that are one-dimensional images of complex phenomena) are more and more frequently applied to solve problems of that type. Although the methods of multivariate statistics used for this purpose differ in the way they treat assessment criteria (defining mutual dependency thresholds, unifying the field of compared criteria), the final effect of their application always offers the option to replace the entire set of features describing a given object with one variable (aggregate). The article presents a potential applicability of one of the so-called discrete multi-criteria decision-making methods (Simple Additive Weighting), which allows to determine a linear combination of normalized elements of the decision matrix and the elements of weight vector. As part of the article, the working conditions at 5 workstations were assessed (a miner’s workstation in 5 underground mine workings being excavated), taking into account 8 assessment criteria (6 were cost criteria and 2 – criteria of qualitative character). In effect of the application of the Simple Additive Weighting method, we could determine the ranking vector R, which allowed to order the examined objects and to carry out a comprehensive assessment of OSH conditions occurring in them.