Iran Occupational Health

Background and aims: TOPSIS as a method in Multi criteria decision making (MCDM) helps decision maker(s) to organize and analyze problems, and to rank alternatives. In this paper, the ergonomic risks factors which may influence health are addressed in a manufacturing company in 2014. Then TOPSIS method is applied to select the different halls that are prioritized in terms of action level and ergonomic conditions.

Methods: This cross-sectional study was done as a descriptive-analytic procedure. It considers conditions in seven halls and 13 tasks were included. Required Information gathered by the demographic questionnaire and ART method for repetitive task assessment. Also TOPSIS as a suitable multi criteria decision making instrument was used to prioritization of company halls. SPSS V20 and MATLAB are used to compute the variables.

Results: The total exposure score based on the ART method equals to 30.07±12.43 were calculated. Data analysis from ART illustrated that 179 cases (74.6% of tasks) were in the high level of risk area and 13.8% were in the medium level of risk. ART-TOPSIS results revealed that Leher hall has been placed in the top lists of action level and degradation hall in the end of this list.

Conclusion: obtained results showed that the TOPSIS method can be used to ergonomic and human factor engineering challenges successfully. It seems that, macro and micro ergonomic solution presentation besides employee's collaboration, based on the scientific decision-making procedures (with employer's cooperation motivation), can leads to effectiveness in health level enhancement of industrial setting increasingly.