Lorenzo Comberti

Following the enforcement of the EEC Directive (1989), focused on the promotion of workers health and safety, several approaches have been developed in the last 30 years to assess the risks related to the different hazards in the work environment and to identify, based on this assessment process, measures and action to promote safety and to reduce the occupational accidents. These approaches generally are focused on the analysis of the working activity and neglect the influence of the worker characteristics involved, strongly limiting the effectiveness of the risk-based decision making.

Nowadays, several pieces of equipment are running over their expected life-time. An equipment rev...amping could solve the situation, but, it is often not possible for economical reasons, regulatory constraints, etc..

The Human Factors contribution in the scope of the industrial process optimization presented in t...his case study had to deal with considerations regarding the physical and mental workload requirements of different workstations and the capabilities of the operators assigned to them. The scope was to provide the industrial management with a better way to allocate human resources to tasks requiring different operational skills.

Nowadays several plants have aging problem. This type of problem occurs because the whole plant o...r some pieces of equipment are still in operation well beyond their design expected life, due e.g. to economical reason, regulatory constrain, or other issues.

Data on occupational accidents are usually stored in large databases by worker compensation autho...rities, and by the safety and prevention teams of companies. An analysis of these databases can play an important role in the prevention of accidents and the reduction of risks, but it can be a complex procedure because of the dimensions and complexity of such databases.

This paper analyses the impact of the most recent Italian safety national regulation (Dlgs. 81/08...) on the occupational accidents frequency and severity in Food and Drink Industry. Food and Drink Industry (FDI) is a branch of manufacturing sector with a relevant role in European Union and Italian economy. Far away from the common way of thinking, the FDI sector has an accident frequency comparable to those of other manufacturing sectors.

Nowadays the majority of organizations operating in manufacturing field recognize the importance ...of including the Human Factor contribution into the industrial process optimization (Hong k. et al., 2007). As far technical measures and work organization procedures have been optimized in order to reduce the defects and upgrade the safety, the Human Factor assessment still represents for Managers a difficult task to deal with.

Following the implementation of international and national regulations and standards pertaining t...he control of risks in different industrial and civil domains, a general increase of the safety knowledge was noticed and recognized in literature (e.g. Lee & Harrison, 2000). Indeed, different campaigns to rise the awareness of the general public were developed and implemented.

Design documentation, safety and security analysis, environmental studies, studies on organizatio...nal factors, product characterization, etc., constitute the knowledge base each process plant, with a higher or lower detail, uses for plant management.

This paper presents the initial framework adopted to assess human error in assembly tasks at a la...rge manufacturing company in Ireland. The model to characterize and predict human error presented in this paper is linked conceptually to the model introduced by Rasch (1980), where the probability of a specified outcome is modelled as a logistic function of the difference between the person capacity and item difficulty.