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Occupational safety concept, which has become a major subject in all industries, has a vital importance in preventing accidents and ensuring a safe working environment. This study proposes an integrated approach to evaluate occupational safety equipment by considering universal design (UD) and technical requirements, both separately and simultaneously. UD principles are concerned with making things usable for anyone, whatever their conditions may be, without any requirements for rearrangement. Two robust multicriteria decision making (MCDM) aid methods, AHP and fuzzy PROMETHEE, are employed to handle the evaluation process in the presented study. The study also includes a demonstration of the proposed approach on a real MCDM problem. The study findings indicate that the proposed approach is valid and accurate, and the inclusion of UD principles has a positive and comprehensive effect on the selection process. C 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

The quality of molded packages heavily depends on the process parameters of the molding process and on the material characteristics of epoxy molding compounds (EMCs). When defects are introduced into the electronic packages in one of the last steps in the manufacturing process, namely, during encapsulation, it may cause high failure costs. To decrease the number of defects due to the molding process, a comprehensive understanding of the impact of process parameters and variations in the characteristics of the EMC on package quality is necessary. This study aimed at supporting a deeper understanding of the influence of process parameters and variations in the material characteristics of the EMC on package quality. A systematic approach was introduced to generate a process model describing the correlation between process parameters and package quality to obtain optimum process parameters for the transfer molding process. The influence of the alterations in material characteristics of the EMC due to prolonged storage duration and humidity on void formation and wire sweep was investigated. An online monitoring method, dielectric analysis (DEA), was implemented into the transfer molding process to monitor the variations in the cure behavior of the EMC. A second molding compound was used to analyze the similarities in the alteration behavior of the molding compounds when subjected to the same preconditioning and to generalize the characteristic information obtained from DEA.