An Extension of the Failure Mode and Effect Analysis with Hesitant Fuzzy Sets to Assess the Occupational Hazards in the Construction Industry

The construction industry is considered as one of the most dangerous industries in terms of occupational safety and has a high rate of occupational incidents and risks compared to other industries. Given the importance of identifying and assessing the occupational hazards in this industry, researchers have conducted numerous studies using statistical methods, multi-criteria decision-making methods, expert-based judgments, and so on. Although, these researchers have used linguistic variables, fuzzy sets and interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy sets to overcome challenges such as uncertainty and ambiguity in the risk assessment conducted by experts; the previous models lack in efficiency if the experts are hesitant in their assessment. This leads to the inability to assign a specific membership degree to any risk. Therefore, in this research, it is tried to provide an improved approach to the Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) method using an Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) method based on the hesitant fuzzy set, which can effectively cope with the hesitance of the experts in the evaluation. Also, Stepwise Weight Assessment Ratio Analysis (SWARA) method is applied for risk factor weighing in the proposed approach. This model is applied to a construction industry case study to solve a realistic occupational risk assessment. Moreover, a comparison is made between the results of this model and those obtained by the conventional FMEA and some other aggregation operators. The results indicate that the newly developed approach is useful and flexible to address complex FMEA problems and can generate logical and reliable priority rankings for failure modes.