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A special issue of International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (ISSN 1660-4601). This special issue belongs to the section "Environmental Science and Engineering".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (21 May 2021) | Viewed by 23878

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Special Issue Editors

Dr. Gianpaolo Di Bona

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Guest Editor

Department of Civil and Industrial Engineering, University of Cassino and Southern Lazio, 03043 Cassino, Italy
Interests: RAMS analysis; process optimization; statistical process control; logistic and quality and multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA); sustainability
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Dr. Antonio Forcina

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Assistant Guest Editor

Department of Engineering, Isola C4, Centro Direzionale Napoli, University of Naples “Parthenope”, 80133 Naples, Italy
Interests: RAMS analysis; simulation; statistical process control; multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA); circular economy; sustainability; LCA/LCC analysis
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Prof. Dr. Filippo De Carlo

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Assistant Guest Editor

Department of Industrial Engineering (DIEF), University of Florence, 50134 Florence, Italy
Interests: industrial plant engineering; maintenance; industrial safety and risk; reliability; manufacturing systems; additive manufacturing
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Safety is one of the most important issues in modern industrial plants and industrial activities. The role of Safety Engineering is to ensure that production systems have acceptable safety levels, not only to respect local laws and regulations, but also to improve production efficiency and to reduce manufacturing costs. For these reasons, the choice of a proper model for risk assessment is crucial.

Risk assessment involves the adoption of different methods and tools to evaluate the risk of accidents for safety in workspaces. Both qualitative and quantitative methods are present in production systems.

It would be useful to investigate the developments in the field, in order to understand strengths and weaknesses of modern approaches. The collection of contributions from different specialists could spread their knowledge to many domains. Therefore, the contribution could help to further knowledge and expertise.

This Special Issue seeks research papers on various aspects of industrial safety, risk management, and reliability allocation in production systems. The main aims of this Special Issue are:

To provide a review of safety literature to identify the range of qualitative and quantitative techniques;
To form a view on the suitability of methods and tools for their applications in the major hazard sectors;
To carry out an assessment of their strengths and weaknesses;
To understand the connections between safety, reliability, and maintenance.

We especially encourage the submission of interdisciplinary work and multi-country collaborative research. We also encourage the submission of manuscripts presenting safety models that focus on issues related to industrial plants, production systems, and maintenance models. We welcome original research papers using different study designs as well as systematic reviews and meta-analyses.

Dr. Gianpaolo Di Bona
Prof. Antonio Forcina
Prof. Filippo De Carlo
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2500 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

safety
reliability
risk analysis
accident evaluation
maintenance
safety and reliability allocation

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Published Papers (6 papers)

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Research

12 pages, 1230 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Global Performance Index for Integrated Management System: GPI-IMS

by Alessandro Silvestri, Domenico Falcone, Gianpaolo Di Bona, Antonio Forcina and Marco Gemmiti

Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2021, 18(13), 7156; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18137156 - 4 Jul 2021

Cited by 11 | Viewed by 3982

Abstract

Background: The present work starts from a literature review of the evolution of Integrated Management Systems (IMSs), considering different points of view and standards: quality, environmental, occupational health and safety, sustainability and social issues. Even if the benefits are possible, there is not a common approach and a clear link between the integration of management systems and business performance, in particular considering safety performance. Methods: The present study analyzes the application of Risk Assessment in order to realize the integration of management systems. The main objective is to provide a tool for an integrated evaluation of all company performances, starting from the definition of some Key Performance Indicators—KPIs—proposed for a particular case study, even if their choice is not the core of the paper. The assessment team members on the basis of their knowledge, experience and useful literature, could choose the right KPIs for the specific application, able to take a picture of the current state and to suggest a possible recommended action of improving. The proposed Risk Assessment approach is an integration of modern management techniques: Integrated Management System and Improving Cycle DMAIC. Results: The new method, called the Global Performance Index for Integrated Management System—GPI-IMS, has been applied to a real case study in the logistic field in order to evaluate its goodness and possible generalization. Conclusions: The proposed method allows to define the requirements that any company must have to perform the best. The role of the assessment team is very important to evaluate the global performance of the company and to suggest the corrective actions to be adopted. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Industrial Safety and Risk Management)

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29 pages, 12320 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Bibliometric and Visualized Overview for the Evolution of Process Safety and Environmental Protection

by Jie Xue, Genserik Reniers, Jie Li, Ming Yang, Chaozhong Wu and P.H.A.J.M. van Gelder

Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2021, 18(11), 5985; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18115985 - 2 Jun 2021

Cited by 24 | Viewed by 4987

Abstract

This paper presents a bibliometric overview of the publications in the principal international journal Process Safety and Environmental Protection (PSEP) from 1990 to 2020 retrieved in the Web of Science (WoS) database to explore the evolution in safety and environmental engineering design and practice, as well as experimental or theoretical innovative research. Therefore, based on the WoS database and the visualization of similarities (VOS) viewer software, the bibliometric analysis and scientometric mapping of the literature have been performed from the perspectives of document types, publication and citation distribution over time, leading authors, countries (regions), institutions, the corresponding collaboration networks, most cited publications and references, focused research fields and topics, research trend evolution over time, etc. The paper provides a comprehensive and quantitative overview and significant picture representation for the journal’s leading and evolutionary trends by employing specific aforementioned bibliometric analysis factors. In addition, by reviewing the evolutionary trends of the journal and the proposed investigated factors, such as the influential works, main research topics, and the research frontiers, this paper reveals the scientific literature production’s main research objectives and directions that could be addressed and explored in future studies. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Industrial Safety and Risk Management)

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14 pages, 6135 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Accident Risk in the Production Sector of EU Countries—Cohort Studies

by Krzysztof Nowacki

Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2021, 18(7), 3618; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18073618 - 31 Mar 2021

Cited by 11 | Viewed by 3239

Abstract

(1) Background: accident rates prove the uneven development of the member countries in the area of work safety. Remedial actions and structural programmes should take into account, e.g., the level of work safety in all European Union (EU) countries. Aim: the identification of differences in the level of work safety in the production sector of EU countries, especially the so-called “old” and “new” EU countries. (2) Methods: for each country UE (in 2008–2018), the relative risk (RR) of an accident at work was determined and a comparative analysis was conducted. (3) Results: an increase in the RR of an accident at work was observed along with an increase in the GDP of a given country. It was found that the level of occupational safety in Sweden and the United Kingdom is higher than in other countries, and lower in Spain and Portugal. In the three largest economies of the EU, Germany, France, and Italy, the RR of the accident in the industrial sector in relation to the national data is one of the lowest in the entire EU, not exceeding 1.3. In The Netherlands, an increase of 1.7 RR of fatal accidents in the industrial sector was observed between 2008 and 2018. (4) Conclusions: RR in the manufacturing sector of the so-called “old” EU is higher than in the so-called “new” EU, which may result from the implementation of Industry 4.0 assumptions in the “old” EU. The presented results and conclusions may be useful in shaping the EU policy in the field of sustainable development of production sectors of individual member countries. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Industrial Safety and Risk Management)

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16 pages, 2955 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Bayesian Estimation for Reliability Engineering: Addressing the Influence of Prior Choice

by Leonardo Leoni, Farshad BahooToroody, Saeed Khalaj, Filippo De Carlo, Ahmad BahooToroody and Mohammad Mahdi Abaei

Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2021, 18(7), 3349; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18073349 - 24 Mar 2021

Cited by 12 | Viewed by 2730

Abstract

Over the last few decades, reliability analysis has attracted significant interest due to its importance in risk and asset integrity management. Meanwhile, Bayesian inference has proven its advantages over other statistical tools, such as maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) and least square estimation (LSE), in estimating the parameters characterizing failure modelling. Indeed, Bayesian inference can incorporate prior beliefs and information into the analysis, which could partially overcome the lack of data. Accordingly, this paper aims to provide a closed-mathematical representation of Bayesian analysis for reliability assessment of industrial components while investigating the effect of the prior choice on future failures predictions. To this end, hierarchical Bayesian modelling (HBM) was tested on three samples with distinct sizes, while five different prior distributions were considered. Moreover, a beta-binomial distribution was adopted to represent the failure behavior of the considered device. The results show that choosing strong informative priors leads to distinct predictions, even if a larger sample size is considered. The outcome of this research could help maintenance engineers and asset managers in integrating their prior beliefs into the reliability estimation process. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Industrial Safety and Risk Management)

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14 pages, 654 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The Impact of Financial and Non-Financial Work Incentives on the Safety Behavior of Heavy Truck Drivers

by Sebastjan Škerlič and Vanja Erčulj

Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2021, 18(5), 2759; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18052759 - 9 Mar 2021

Cited by 4 | Viewed by 3457

Abstract

The goal of the research is to determine how compensation affects the safety behavior of truck drivers and consequently the frequency of traffic accidents. For this purpose, a survey was conducted on a sample of 220 truck drivers in international road transport in the EU, where the results of the Structural Equation Model (SEM) show that in the current state of the transport sector, financial and non-financial incentives have a positive impact on the work and safety behavior of drivers. Financial incentives also have an impact on drivers’ increased perception of their driving ability, while moving violations continue to have a major impact on the number of accidents. The proposed improvements enable decision-makers at the highest level to adopt legal solutions to help manage the issues that have been affecting the industry from a work, social and safety point of view for the past several years. The results of the research therefore represent an important guideline for improvements to the legislature as well as in the systematization of truck driver compensation within companies. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Industrial Safety and Risk Management)

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12 pages, 5004 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Reliability Estimation of Reinforced Slopes to Prioritize Maintenance Actions

by Farshad BahooToroody, Saeed Khalaj, Leonardo Leoni, Filippo De Carlo, Gianpaolo Di Bona and Antonio Forcina

Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2021, 18(2), 373; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18020373 - 6 Jan 2021

Cited by 33 | Viewed by 3132

Abstract

Geosynthetics are extensively utilized to improve the stability of geotechnical structures and slopes in urban areas. Among all existing geosynthetics, geotextiles are widely used to reinforce unstable slopes due to their capabilities in facilitating reinforcement and drainage. To reduce settlement and increase the bearing capacity and slope stability, the classical use of geotextiles in embankments has been suggested. However, several catastrophic events have been reported, including failures in slopes in the absence of geotextiles. Many researchers have studied the stability of geotextile-reinforced slopes (GRSs) by employing different methods (analytical models, numerical simulation, etc.). The presence of source-to-source uncertainty in the gathered data increases the complexity of evaluating the failure risk in GRSs since the uncertainty varies among them. Consequently, developing a sound methodology is necessary to alleviate the risk complexity. Our study sought to develop an advanced risk-based maintenance (RBM) methodology for prioritizing maintenance operations by addressing fluctuations that accompany event data. For this purpose, a hierarchical Bayesian approach (HBA) was applied to estimate the failure probabilities of GRSs. Using Markov chain Monte Carlo simulations of likelihood function and prior distribution, the HBA can incorporate the aforementioned uncertainties. The proposed method can be exploited by urban designers, asset managers, and policymakers to predict the mean time to failures, thus directly avoiding unnecessary maintenance and safety consequences. To demonstrate the application of the proposed methodology, the performance of nine reinforced slopes was considered. The results indicate that the average failure probability of the system in an hour is

2.8 \times 10^{- 5}

during its lifespan, which shows that the proposed evaluation method is more realistic than the traditional methods. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Industrial Safety and Risk Management)

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