Pushing and Pulling Risk Assessment in Fiat Group Automobiles Industrial Reality: Methods to Analyze Critical Operative Conditions According to ISO 11228-2 Principles

Abstract

The Italian legislation, D.Lgs 81/08, requires employer to make the assessment of every risk the worker is exposed to, including the risk of biomechanical overload of musculoskeletal structure due to Manual Material Handling. In particular, the Italian legislation recalls international ISO standard of 11228 series as reference to Manual Material Handling risk assessment. More in deep, ISO 11228-2 is the reference standard to the risk assessment of pushing and pulling tasks. According to this standard, the risk assessment can be carried out using two analysis levels, each one characterized by a specific method. The first level analysis is deeply used in the industrial reality, it allows a fast screening of risk factors and it is based on an evaluation checklist and tables coming from Snook&Ciriello psychophysical tables. Psychophysical tables reports experimental force values based on risk factors of load, environment and operator characteristics. Effectively, the risk level is assessed by a comparison between measured initial and maintenance forces and the corresponding force values reported in Snook & Ciriello tables. Snook&Ciriello tables are a collection of experimental data (psychophysical data) and this is the main limitation in their use because of they don’t cover all conditions that could be present in the complex industrial reality as the automotive contest is. Therefore, Fiat Group Automobiles (FGA) has internally developed a conservative method to analyze pushing and pulling tasks, according to ergonomics principles mentioned in the legislation requirements and shared with Occupational Doctors. This method allows to assess the risk of biomechanical overload of pushing and pulling tasks, when the critical operative conditions of the task are not explicitly comparable to the discrete value of psychophysical tables. The developed method is based on standardize procedure to experimentally measure initial and maintenance forces as well as to statistically elaborate the experimental data. The application of this procedure allows to have repeatable and comparable experimental data, where an interpretability of the current legislation in open, because of ISO standard does not give detailed and unambiguous information to acquire and statistically manage the experimental forces data. Finally, a case study of FGA methodology application will be illustrated.

Keywords: Pushing and Pulling, Snook and Ciriello, Ergonomics

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1001225