Track: Decision Sciences

Abstract

The ready-made garments (RMG) industry of Bangladesh is one of the renowned export-oriented garment industries in the world. Several hazardous fire incidents at RMG factories in recent decades became a matter of concern for national and international policymakers as well as stakeholders. Therefore, this study has been conducted to determine a prioritizing order of the fire risk factors of the RMG industry to assist decision-makers while implementing mitigation strategies. For this study, fire risk factors have been clustered into six criteria- causative factors, fire separation, egress obstruction, fire detection, fire protection, and egress lighting. Then the fire safety inspection reports of randomly selected 50 RMG factories have been analyzed with a Multi-Criteria Decision-making (MCDM) approach, the Criteria Importance Through Inter-Criteria Correlation (CRITIC) method, to determine the objective weights of the selected criteria. The number of risk factors observed in each criterion during fire safety inspections at the RMG factories has been considered as the numerical input for the CRITIC method. Prioritization has been obtained with the descending order of the computed weights for the risk criteria. This study finds that ‘egress obstruction’, ‘causative factors’, and ‘fire separation’ are the most three weighted risk criteria by applying the CRITIC method. This prioritization will be helpful for decision-makers when the hierarchical implementation of mitigation actions is necessary due to various managerial constraints. The result of this study is expected to aid the managers of RMG factories to be more specific and accurate in case of deciding in a challenging situation.