Brief and project description
RiskSME (Development of a Tool to Support Risk Management in SMEs) is a national initiative that aims to improve Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) performance across the diverse landscape of small and medium-sized enterprises. Led by a scientific consortium that brings together research expertise from institutions like the Polytechnic Institute of Porto (IPP) and regional safety specialists, the project focuses on addressing the critical resource constraints that limit workplace risk prevention. Its goal is to develop an accessible, cost-effective framework that maps organizational behaviors and risk factors, creating a virtuous circle between safety researchers, corporate leadership, and workforce representation. The Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, through LIACC, is one of the specialized research partners in this consortium.
The motivation behind RiskSME is straightforward: as small and medium-sized businesses drive economic development, they also face severe difficulties in establishing mature risk management systems, increasing the likelihood of workplace accidents and regulatory gaps. Making risk prevention "accessible" means ensuring that diagnostics and interventions are accurate, customizable, and transparent, fostering institutional trust and safer industrial environments without imposing heavy financial burdens on smaller businesses.
Within this broader effort, LIACC's contribution focuses on data modeling, statistical integration, and decision support architecture as a basis for building robust evaluation toolkits. These tools standardize complex safety parameters, employer commitment variables, and regulatory requirements collected from diverse enterprise audits. By combining advanced data-driven profiling with occupational health expertise, the work aims to make safety performance assessment more rigorous, reproducible, and adaptable to specific industry niches than conventional, one-size-fits-all checklists.
The expected outcome is a set of intelligent methods and a functional Decision Support System (DSS) prototype that help managers and external advisors assess whether their workplace risk prevention practices behave effectively before accidents happen — turning abstract health and safety regulations into concrete, measurable, and actionable corporate criteria.
Period: May 2017 – May 2020