The house of safety: A novel method for risk assessment including human misbehaviour

In this paper, a novel method called House of Safety (HoS) for the risk assessment during the design of machineries is proposed. The approach supports the integration of the human behaviour of the workers aiming to assess the risks arising from human misbehaviour in the man-machine interaction. Modifying the well-known “house of quality”, the basic design tool of the management approach known as Quality Function Deployment (QFD), the risk priority number (RPN) of the risks due to the human misbehaviour and their inter-correlated domino effects are evaluated considering the severity, detectability and occurrence criteria that are weighted using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). Thereafter, the safety protective devices, that are most effective to manage the risks due to the human behaviour in the man-machine interaction, are selected on the basis of the RPN and their correlated effectiveness. The proposed approach is applied to an ordinary maintenance activity on a fruit and vegetable hot refiner. The effectiveness and usefulness of the original methodology for the selection of the most effective technical solutions to mitigate the risks due to the human misbehaviour are presented in the provided case study.