Analysis and Modeling of New and Emerging Occupational Risks in the Context of Advanced Manufacturing Processes

Abstract

Besides traditional occupational risks, advanced manufacturing processes (AMP) can generate other risks described by the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (EU-OSHA) as “new and emerging risks” (NER) to occupational safety and health. Several studies have been carried out by the EU-OSHA in order to identify all these risks. However, the direct use of this set of NER in identification procedures of occupational risks, generally applied in labour processes and particularly in AMP, may result in the identification of traditional occupational risks rather than NER, mainly because they have been defined without following a risk reference model. To solve this problem a risk model has been developed that improves and complements the NER definition of EU-OSHA, from which a second model has been developed to analyze the structure of the considered set of NER. It is observed that with the results obtained, the current descriptions of these NER do not explain their quality of “new and “emerging”.