Track: Decision Sciences

Abstract

Electrical accidents wound and kill a lot of people in the ready-made garment (RMG) industries of Bangladesh every year. Regular electrical safety inspections and prioritization of the identified significant risk factors can effectively minimize the occurrence of these electrical accidents. This study proposes a Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) based framework to prioritize the frequently observed significant electrical risk factors in the RMG industries of Bangladesh to aid the decision-makers to ensure a safe and sustainable workplace. In this study, 26 most significant electrical risk factors have been identified from the opinions of 12 experts who have analyzed the electrical safety inspection reports accumulated from 100 different RMG industries. After that, the Best Worst Method (BWM) has been applied to find the weights of the three evaluation criteria- Consequence, Likelihood, and Manageability, based on the expert feedback. Then, a Weighted Aggregated Sum Product Assessment (WASPAS) method has been utilized to get the final ranking of the risk factors. The existence of hot spots detected by thermal imaging, improper support and protection for hanging cables, and heat source adjacent to electrical installations have been determined as the most prioritized electrical risk factors for the RMG industries. The findings of this research are expected to help the managers and other decision-makers of RMG industries to devise effective mitigation strategies to minimize the electrical safety risks in an efficient and hierarchically.