A Hierarchical Solution Approach for Occupational Health and Safety Inspectors' Task Assignment Problem

Background Occupational health and safety (OHS) is a significant interest of all governments to prevent workplace hazards. Although appropriate legislation and regulations are essentials for the protection of workers, they are solely not enough. Application of them in practice should be secured by an efficient inspection system. Fundamental components of an inspection system are inspectors and their audit tasks. Maintaining the fair balanced task assignment among inspectors strictly enhances the efficiency of the overall system. Methods This study proposes a two-phased goal programming approach for OHS inspectors' task assignments and presents a case study. Results The solution approach gives the balanced assignment of inspectors to the workplaces in different cities of the country in the planning period. The obtained schedule takes into account the distances covered by the work places and the number of the workplaces' employees to be audited and pays attention to the human factors by considering the preferences of the inspectors. The comparisons between the obtained optimal schedule and the implemented one that is produced manually show that the approach not only maintains the technical requirements of the problem, but also provides social and physical balance to the task assignment. Conclusion Both the approach and the application study are expected to offer fruitful inspirations in the area of safety management and policy and they provide a good guide for social policy and organizational aspects in the field of OHS inspectors' task assignment.