Occupational health and safety risk assessment based on linguistic distribution preference relations and the gained and lost dominance score method

Occupational health and safety risk assessment (OHSRA) is a crucial activity to identify and analyze the risk of occupational hazards for enhancing the well-being and safety of workers. This study aimed to propose a new OHSRA model by combining linguistic distribution preference relations (LDPRs) with the gained and lost dominance score (GLDS) method for evaluating and prioritizing the risk of occupational hazards. LDPRs are employed to capture experts' evaluations on the risk of occupational hazards. An improved method based on the removal effects of criteria (MEREC) is used for deriving the weights of risk criteria. The GLDS method is then modified to determine the risk priority of occupational hazards. Finally, a healthcare case is presented for demonstrating the proposed OHSRA model. The results show that the new model is practical for describing the complex linguistic risk assessments of experts and ranking the risk of occupational hazards in OHSRA.