Work's task concept in safe machinery design

The work equipment’s designer has to apply the “machinery” European directive. Regarding to the injuries in relation to the risks arising out of the use of machinery, this requirements are not enough to ensure the workers’ health and safety. So, to help the designers to apply the concepts of “integrated prevention” is a necessity.

A previous paper at MOSIM 2014 showed INRS’s proposals: two tools to integrate health and safety in design, one tool based on functional analysis for the specification step, and a second tool based on FMEA (failure mode and effects analysis) for project management. This paper showed also the need to create some tools to help designers in all the design’s steps to apply the health and safety requirements.

In this aim, this paper describes some results of ongoing work about a new tool to integrate health and safety during design. This tool is based on use cases concept. This machinery use case concept was present in the two first tools by this hypothesis: to be safe, machinery has to be adapted to the workers’ activities. The machine’s uses and the worker’s activities are combined in this paper under the generic concept of “work’s task”.