Integrated Ergonomic and Safety Risk Assessment of Manual Material Handling in Automotive Manufacturing: A Review with Implications for Iranian Parts Factories

Manual material handling remains common in automotive manufacturing because parts, containers, and tools must move between machining, inspection, assembly, storage, and dispatch. These tasks expose workers to cumulative musculoskeletal loading and to immediate hazards such as dropped parts, sharp edges, unstable loads, restricted visibility, and interaction with industrial traffic. The literature has usually examined these two risk groups separately. This structured narrative review evaluates observational methods, lifting and force models, safety risk tools, and recent sensor-based approaches that can support an integrated assessment. Evidence from automotive and related manufacturing settings shows that Rapid Entire Body Assessment, Rapid Upper Limb Assessment, the Revised NIOSH Lifting Equation, Manual Handling Assessment Charts, and pushing or pulling tools address different parts of the problem and can produce different priorities for the same task. Studies in Iran and other automotive settings also show that training alone has limited value when container design, working height, line pace, and material flow remain unchanged. A practical framework is therefore proposed in which task mapping, ergonomic assessment, immediate hazard analysis, integrated prioritization, and post-control reassessment are completed as one process. Raw method scores should remain visible, while a normalized combined score may be used only to order corrective actions. For Iranian automotive parts factories, the most feasible controls are height-adjustable pallets, shallow or side-opening containers, improved grips, small conveyors, maintained carts, separated pedestrian routes, and participatory redesign. Future research should validate integrated rankings against injuries, symptoms, and production outcomes.

کلیدواژه ها:

manual material handling ، automotive manufacturing ، ergonomic risk assessment ، occupational safety ، Iran