Scaffold-related falls remain a major safety concern in demolition projects, where temporary access systems are frequently erected, modified, used, and dismantled under changing structural and site conditions. These characteristics complicate risk prioritization because scaffold failures may involve interacting human, technical, organizational, and environmental factors. This study develops an expert-based risk prioritization framework for scaffold-related fall risks in demolition projects by integrating Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA), interval neutrosophic fuzzy (INF) theory, Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL), and Multi-Attributive Border Approximation Area Comparison (MABAC). Using the 4M1E perspective, namely Man, Machine, Material, Method, and Environment, 37 demolition-specific failure modes were identified through literature review and expert elicitation. Ten experts evaluated these failure modes using the SODE criteria, namely Severity, Occurrence, Detection difficulty, and Expected Cost impact. INF theory was used to represent uncertainty, hesitation, and judgmental variation in expert assessments. INF-DEMATEL was applied to examine interrelationships among the SODE criteria and derive interdependence-aware criterion weights, while INF-MABAC was used to rank the failure modes according to their distance from the Border Approximation Area. The framework was illustrated through an empirical application in Taiwan’s demolition industry. The results identified Severity as the most influential criterion. The highest-priority failure modes were insufficient safety awareness, improper scaffold-to-structure anchoring, and inadequate scaffold maintenance and inspection governance. Comparison with risk priority number (RPN)-based methods and sensitivity analyses using expert exclusion and Severity-weight variation showed that the ranking was generally consistent and reasonably stable under the tested conditions. The proposed framework provides a structured, uncertainty-aware decision-support procedure for identifying prevention priorities in demolition scaffold operations.
Lai et al. (Thu,) studied this question.