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Freeware
Baseline Survey Simulator V2.1
As a service to the industrial safety and hygiene community, Exposure Assessment
Solutions, Inc. has developed and released as freeware the Baseline Survey Simulator
Version 2. The Baseline Survey Simulator was designed solely for educational
purposes, to simulate and illustrate how different exposure sampling strategies
may perform in actual exposure scenarios.
Download Here
The Baseline Survey Simulator program generates artificial exposure measurements,
which are then run through five different decision logics. These decision logics
approximate the decision process for the following five industrial hygiene professionals:
- an OSHA inspector, who conducts audits and is required to consider acceptable
any measurement that is equal to or less than the PEL
- a plant IH who recommends that the company adopt the least complicated strategy
permitted by the OSHA 6b (single substance) regulations
- a corporate IH who believes that the AIHA exposure assessment model is superior
to the legal minimum requirements
- a consultant (Consultant A) who agrees with the corporate IH that the AIHA
model is superior to a simple inspection procedure or a 6b type strategy for
assessing exposures, but that the lower TLV® should be used as it represents
a state-of-the-art assessment of the risk associated with exposure to this
particular substance
- a consultant (Consultant B) who has bought into the false notion that nearly
all 8-hour TWA exposure limits can be interpreted by the employer as the upper
limit for a worker's long-term, lifetime average exposure; consequently single
overexposures are unimportant; all that matters is that the mean exposure
be maintained at or below the exposure limit (whether it is a TWA PEL or TWA
TLV® or TWA WEEL®).
So, we have five different strategies, or views regarding ...
- which exposure limit is appropriate for the employer to adopt
- how many exposure measurements should be collected
- how these measurements should be analyzed (i.e., the application of simple
decision rules or a statistical analysis)
- how the exposure data or the statistics should be interpreted relative to
the OEL
Given these different strategies, the questions to be addressed with the BS
Simulator are:
- Which strategies tend to be more reliable in detecting a poorly controlled
work environment (a red light decision)?
- Which strategies are least sensitive (consistently yielding a green light
decision), despite a high percentage of overexposures?
The Baseline Survey Simulator as it looks when first opened.
The Baseline Survey Simulator as it looks after several measurements have been
collected. In this case, all five IHs reached a decision: three were incorrect
and two correct. The question is "Over the long run, which strategy will
more frequently detect poorly-controlled work environments?"
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