New approach integrating the health, safety, and environment systems for the maintenance function in industries

Abstract

Health, safety, and environment risk assessment, based on company quality, health, safety, and environment commitments, constitutes a precondition in the definition of the strategy to be adopted by the maintenance service. The imperfections of the knowledge; the disputes over opinions among decision-makers; and the absence of health, safety, and environment equipment risk assessment integrated models hinder the assessment of risk acceptability. In this article, we propose a health, safety, and environment risk management approach for the equipment maintenance. This approach expands the scope of action relative to the overall equipment risk-level assessment. It is based, on one hand, on fuzzy logic and, on the other hand, on two methods of decision-making support: the method of converting verbal judgments into numerical values and the pair comparison of decision criteria. This approach allows the maintenance service to implement a health, safety, and environment risk control policy for the most critical equipment. Therefore, it allows to improve the staff and product safety and to protect the environment in accordance with the strategic objectives.