Analysis of Factors Affecting Human Reliability in the Mining Process Design Using Fuzzy Delphi and DEMATEL Methods

Abstract

Design errors have always been recognized as one of the main factors affecting safety and health management and sustainable development in surface mines. Unfortunately, scant attention is paid to design errors and the factors causing them. Therefore, based on expert opinions, this study aimed to identify, rank, and investigate cause-and-effect relationships among variables influencing human error in surface mine design in Iran. The study variables were identified by reviewing previous literature on “latent human errors” and “design errors.” After specifying effective variables, two rounds of the Fuzzy Delphi study were carried out to reach a consensus among experts. Nineteen variables with an influencing score of 0.7 and higher were screened and given to the experts to be analyzed for cause-and-effect relationships by the fuzzy DEMATEL method. The results of the study revealed that the following variables were the major factors affecting human error as root causes: poor organizational management (0.62), resource allocation (0.30), training level (0.27), and experience (0.25). Moreover, self-confidence (−0.29), fatigue (−0.28), depression (−0.25), and motive (−0.23) were found to be effect (dependent) variables. Our findings can help organizations, particularly surface mines, to opt for effective strategies to control factors affecting design errors and consequently reduce workers’ errors, providing a good basis for achieving sustainable development.

Developing an Alternate Mineral Transportation System by Evaluating Risk of Truck Accidents in the Mining Industry—A Critical Fuzzy DEMATEL Approach

“…Upon noting some of the limitations of common fuzzy concept-based risk assessment methods (as captured in Table 1), the authors opted for the use of the Fuzzy DEMATEL methodology to assess the causal influences of haul truck accidents in Indian mines. The authors reviewed previous research that utilizes the Fuzzy DEMATEL approach to analyze variables for cause-and-effect relationships in the mining industry in India, Iran, China, and other geographies [26][27][28][29]. The gap in literature that utilizes this methodology to particularly assess the transportation-related risks in Indian mines inspired the present research.…”

Integrated Fuzzy DEMATEL-ISM-NK for Metro Operation Safety Risk Factor Analysis and Multi-Factor Risk Coupling Study

“…This method is based on expert linguistic terminology expressions, which need to be converted from fuzzy linguistic terms to definite values to avoid ambiguity and reach a unified opinion. Fuzzy DEMATEL is a multi-indicator decision-making technique, which has the advantage that the decisionmaking process is based on pairwise comparisons and acceptance relationships, and fuzzy DEMATEL is applied to different areas of research, such as risk assessment and safety management [31,32]. In this paper, to solve the fuzzy problem of expert evaluation in the DEMATEL method, the triangular fuzzy numbers in fuzzy theory are introduced, and the initial direct matrix is fuzzified by applying the semantic evaluation and fuzzy number conversion relation of Li [33].…”

A New Integrated Risk-Assessment Model for Minimizing Human-Machine Error Consequences in a Preventive Maintenance System

“…Expert judgment way has been used in many studies that are concerned with identifying and evaluating the factors influencing human errors during the implementation of inspection and maintenance tasks as [55,59,60]. Several previous studies [61][62][63][64] showed that the accuracy of the analytical value of expert judgments increased with increasing experience and training years of judges. Therefore, we used a group of judges who have more than ten years of experience and training in the field of maintenance, occupational health and safety, and the elicitation was done on an individual basis to avoid biases that may affect the opinions of the expert judgment.…”