Investigating interactions among vital variables affecting situation awareness based on Fuzzy DEMATEL method

In many accident reports, failure in situation awareness is mentioned as one of the immediate causes of those accidents. Accordingly, the identification of variables affecting situation awareness and their interactions are key factors in preventing accidents. This study aims to identify interactions among the most important individual, situational, and organizational variables affecting situation awareness in industrial workplaces. Using Fuzzy Delphi and Fuzzy DEMATEL methods, this study was conducted based on the data collected from experts’ judgments. The results show that organizational variables and some individual variables are the critical factors affecting situation awareness, and their effect is directly or indirectly created by situational and individual variables. The results of the study can be used to design proper guidelines for industry managers and employers to improve safety performance in the workplace; in addition, the findings of the study can be employed to design future studies to model the predictive power of variables affecting situation awareness in different work environments. •Organizational variables along with some individual variables are the main variables affecting situation awareness.•Organization’s safety attitude, system design and information sharing are the most important organizational variables.•“Work and safety knowledge” and “Experience in the job” were the main individual variables.•Result can provides a framework to select most important Safety programs.