A structured procedure of risk analysis and control for safety integration in machinery design

Machinery is responsible for a growing number of occupational accidents. Many of the recent studies relating to these accidents reach the same conclusion: several industrial machines are not properly designed with regard to occupational health and safety considerations. While it appears that design engineers do not lack awareness or motivation to integrate safety into their design, the fact is that many of them do not know how to make this integration efficiently. The integration of risk analysis into the design process, while essential to a safe design, does not appear to be readily applicable by machinery design engineers. This paper proposes an explicitly defined systematic risk analysis and control procedure to be used by machinery design engineers. The proposed procedure is meant to be intimately integrated in the industrial machinery design process to support an efficient risk analysis during design.