The use of quality function deployment in hazard analysis and risk evaluation

Occupational health and safety (OHS) still represent a relevant problem at a global level despite the ever-increasing effort made in the last years at the normative level. Recent research on the factors influencing this phenomenon has shown the difficulties in bringing to light accidents’ causalities and in the definition of the related measures for safety management. Actually, the risk assessment should take into account the mutual influences among the different risks and the related potential effects, while performing risk assessment in a sequential manner cannot always consider these interactions properly. To deal with such an issue, the use of the Quality Function Deployment (QFD) method has been proposed in several studies to perform hazard analysis and risk assessment more thoroughly. Nevertheless, although the above-mentioned studies provide remarkable research insights concerning the use of QFD in such a context, a comparative analysis bringing to light the effectiveness of the different approaches is missing. To reduce this gap the current study aims at investigating the recent research proposing QFD as a tool for hazard analysis and risk evaluation. The outcome of the study has shown that while all the approaches rely on the cause-effect mechanism inherent to the functioning of the House of Quality (HoQ), different goals and results can be achieved depending on the analysis standpoint (i.e. a top-down or a bottom-up approach) and the supportive tools used, such as analytic network process (ANP), or fuzzy logic. Accordingly, the study output can contribute practically to augmenting knowledge on the use of decision-making tools based on QFD in safety management.