Application of Statistical Methods on Occupational Health and Safety Management in the Mining Industry in Ezhou City, China

Abstract: Chinaʹs mining enterprises are confronted with insufficient safety investments, insufficientsafety benefits, recurrent occupational diseases and accidents, low level of safety riskmanagement, and many employee complaints, that seriously affect the economicdevelopment and the sustainable development of the country. Selection of scientific, accurateand comprehensive evaluation methods of all aspects of occupational health and safetymanagement will directly affect the evaluation results and then the direction of improvement;which is greatly needed.The aim of this thesis is twofold: one aim is to test and analyze a set of evaluationmethods that provide different perspectives on how occupational health and safetymanagement really works in the mining industry in Ezhou City, China. The other aim is toexplore a set of comprehensive evaluation methods that are suitable for occupational healthand safety management in the industries as a whole.This thesis is based on the theory of Multi Objective Decision Making and Grey System,and is broken down into three phases including: The first phase of my study: to describe the applications of the methods in five aspects ofoccupational health and safety in the mining industry in Ezhou City, China. This isshown in five articles and Chapter 1‐5. The second phase: to present some suggestions of improvements for the development ofthe occupational health and safety in the mining industry in Ezhou City, China. This ispresented in Chapter 6 in my study. The third phase: to explore a set of comprehensive evaluation methods that are suitablefor the occupational health and safety management in the industries. This is also shownin Chapter 6 in my study.In this thesis I mainly used six methods to evaluate occupational health and safetymanagement and the suitability of them for this type of research as well as in other types inindustrial activity. The six methods included in my research are: entropy weight(EW), failuremode and effect analysis (FMEA), improved analytic hierarchy process (AHP), dataenvelopment analysis (DEA), grey relational analysis (GRA) and 2‐tuple linguisticinformation (2‐TLI). The results of the analysis showed that: EW can be well used to evaluate the multi indicators of occupational health and safetymanagement, and can be extended to other areas such as safety management evaluation,the quality of the project, project forecasting and other industrial activities; FMEA has been proved practical, simple and less costly in the perspective of riskmanagement, occupational health and safety management, identification and control ofenvironmental factors in enterprises, and quality key point preventive control in allindustrial activities; Improved AHP is practical, simple and less costly for multi objective and multi criteriadecision making problems in all industrial activities; DEA is special for production efficiency and can well estimate the effective productionfrontier by calculating the history data of the financial department, and embodies itsunique advantages in dealing with multi indicator inputs and multi indicator outputs inall industrial activities; GRA does not require too much sample size and any typical distribution regulation; thecalculated amount of data is relatively small, and the results would always be in goodagreement with the qualitative analysis, so it is quite suitable for measuring the degree ofassociation between factors for indicator evaluation according to their similarity ordissimilarity. GRA can cope with the types of problem associated with comparisonbetween evaluation objects and the comparison object in all industrial activities; 2‐TLI is special for language information and can provide the basis for multi‐attributedecision analysis in spite of large amounts of calculation in all industrial activities.On the whole, each method has its advantages and disadvantages, and the key to judgingwhether a method is most suitable is if it can withstand the validation of practice. Anyhow,the main contribution of this research is that it has systematically tested and verified a set ofstatistical methods applied in a mining industry in Ezhou, China, and explored a set ofstatistical methods utilized in occupational health and safety management in industrialactivities. Additionally, another contribution of this research is that it has provided a directionfor improvement of sustainable development.