An Interval Valued Pythagorean Fuzzy AHP–TOPSIS Integrated Model for Ergonomic Assessment of Setup Process under SMED

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments for authors

After reviewing the contents, the manuscript could be significantly improved in the following aspects.

1. The title of the manuscript should be replaced. As far as I concerned, the contribution of this study is not the ergonomic risk analysis. According to the authors, a methodology was proposed to analyze the ergonomic risk involved in the setup process, and then, the proposed methodology was separately applied to the initial setup process and the improved setup process, as a results, the total risk scores of the initial setup process and the improved setup process can be obtained and compared, which can be used to illustrate the advantage of the improved setup process. In addition, the term of “methodology” in the title is not appropriate, as the authors stated, the SMED is a lean tool, not a method or methodology.

2. The abstract can also be improved greatly. Firstly, the background introduction nearly takes half of the contents, which is inappropriate. There are grammar errors in the abstract, such as in the line 17, the term of “integrated” should be “integrating”, in line 20, “Integrated Fuzzy” should be “integration fuzzy”. In addition, according to the last sentence of the abstract, we can also find the contribution of this study is not ergonomic risk analysis.

3. The principle of the proposed model is the third issue I concerned. The figure 3 can be used to illustrate the overview for the proposed methodology, we have to realize the SMED is a mature tool, and in this study, SMED is not improved or optimized, all the authors did in this study is just to adjust setup activities from internal to external, therefore, I argue that the proposed model in this study is just to implement ergonomic risk assessment, which mainly is presented in step 2, actually, the contents of step 2 is the genuine contribution of this study. Steps 3 and 4 are just the adjustment and streamlining of the setup activities qualitatively by means of safety meeting or expert consultation, which has little academic value. Then, the contents of step 5 are just re-conduct the procedure of step 2.

4. The structure of this manuscript should be improved. Many contents in the section of introduction should be moved into the literature review, and figure 1 can be removed. The section 3 (SMED) can be removed from the manuscript, and the description of SMED can be added in the “Proposed model”. Actually, as I concerned aforementioned, the authors pay little attention to the SMED, in other words, the SMED is just the background of this study.

 

There are many small issues that must be paid attention by the authors. For instance:

5. In line 31, the term “as” should be followed by “is considered”.

6. In line 33, is it necessary that the initial letters for “lean Manufacturing” are capital letters?

7. In line 39, the “setup times” should be “setup time” as far as I concerned. Because the term of “time” is uncountable noun when it is associated with a clock, such as minutes, seconds. The same error appears many times in the manuscript.

8. In line 91, “first” should be “firstly”.

9. In line 117, the full name for PVC should be provide when it is appeared firstly.

10. In lines 522-523, the term of “activities” should be “tasks”? Because there are no activities in table 5 but the tasks.

11. as with the last sentence of section 5.3, part of the internal tasks are converted as the external tasks, the time for completing all the internal tasks would be certainly reduced, which is obvious, and there is no necessary to investigate.

12. as with the last sentence of section 5.4, the authors stated “the corresponding suggestions for setup tasks are presented in table 5”, actually, the table 5 is just the description of the setup process, which is appeared in section 5.1, where are the suggestions? It is confused.

13. In section 5.4, the introduction of kit tool car and 5S is the improvement of activities, not the streamlining of all the setup activities, the contents of section 5.4 should be focused on the streamlining all the setup activities.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors,

Your research activity and the submitted paper are of high interest and relevance for improving workers' health in the work environment and developing objective and consistent methods and evaluation systems.

 

However, I found some critical issues in your paper. For example, the developed evaluation system should be explained more clearly. 

First, it is unclear which methods were used to assess the ergonomic risk for different work activities before using the MCDM (lines 257-284; figures 3, 4). You can add a column to Table 2 (in addition to the one with the references), presenting the adopted methods and activities in detail. 

It would be appropriate to illustrate more clearly the work activity that is the focus of the intervention; it might be helpful to include a storyboard or meaningful pictures of the person during the performance of certain critical activities instead of figure 5.

Table 5 presents both the activities performed by the worker (columns 1-4) and the project actions (5-7). The latter could be introduced in a new table (section 5.3 or 5.5), or supplemented in table 15, dividing the activities before and after the project intervention.

It would be essential to include a legend in tables 6, 7, 8 etc. or a reference to the explanation of the acronyms used, to ease the interpretation and understanding.

In lines 504-505, a Modified Delphi method is presented; it is unclear how it is structured, conducted, and which the results are.

Figure 8, which presents the two workers' work activities and tasks, is unclear and could be visually improved to make it easier to read and understand.

In the intervention,  you propose the employment of two workers. How much does this affect the ergonomic risk compared to the previous case study?

Chapter 6 presents the results obtained. The results of the intervention are presented in a very concise form, comparing working time and setup time before and after the intervention. For the riskiest tasks (t27, T28 and t32), it would be interesting to show in detail which task redesign intervention led to reduced risk and decreased working time.

Finally, I would suggest referring to the International Standards. For example, in the introductory part, lines 53-58 and 64-74, about WMSDs.

Avoid including acronyms in the abstract. When introducing acronyms, remember the correct use of capital letters (e.g. line 97).

I hope these suggestions will help you in improving the paper.

Best regards.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

This paper aims to study "An Interval Valued Pythagorean Fuzzy AHP-TOPSIS integrated model for ergonomic risk analysis under SMED methodology". However, in my opinion, this paper contains some interesting results which make a significant and technically sound contribution to the field. Based on the above reasons, my overall evaluation is that the paper can be published in this journal after the following corrections:

1. In the introduction, authors should highlight the main objective of the the proposed research.

2. Please improve the language to avoid any typos, alignment and grammar mistakes. Please try to proofread the English by a native English speaker.

3. Comparison table can be included to explain the proposed method to the existing techniques  and also explain the advantages and limitations of this article.

4. Pay attention to the format of the tables.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf