The Fourth Industrial Revolution is radically reshaping the procedures and the manufacturing environments through the digitalization process. The digitalization process can change according to the context and to specific solutions, and it is able to modify manufacturing systems and production areas. All the employees are directly affected by the transformation of the working environment, manufacturing tools, and working conditions and by the increasing need for new competencies. In this context, it is crucial to identify new and emerging hazards concerning the health and safety of the employees to ensure a conscious and safe digital transformation for everyone involved. In this regard, the paper presents the state of the research and defines seven areas of interest for a safe and harmless digital transformation for the employees, drawing attention to the hazards in the different technological areas. The state of the research unveils the absence of detailed analysis to identify specific hazards of 4.0 technologies. Therefore, every specific 4.0 technologies is analyzed by an extensive review to provide a comprehensive matrix of new and emerging hazards for health and safety within digitalized manufacturing systems. The results can help manufacturing organizations to perform robust risk assessments for worker when introducing specific 4.0 technologies.

After illustrating the motivations for this special issue, the Editorial provides a framework of the maintenance and facility management areas, deploying the main development trends that are in action for their improvement in efficiency and effectiveness. Also the strategy and course of actions to pursue such trends are included into the framework. Finally, a structured review note of the papers included in the special issue is presented, illustrating their contribution to the framework enrichment.

Post mortem incident investigations are vital to prevent the occurrence of similar events and improve system safety. The increasing interactions of technical, human and organizational elements in modern systems pose new challenges for safety management, demanding approaches capable of complementing techno-centric investigations with social-oriented analyses. Hence, traditional risk analysis methods rooted in event-chain reactions and looking for individual points of failure are increasingly inadequate to deal with system-wide investigations. They normally focus on an oversimplified analysis of how work was expected to be conducted, rather than exploring what exactly occurred among the involved agents. Therefore, a detailed analysis of incidents beyond the immediate failures extending towards socio-technical threats is necessary. This study adopts the system-theoretic accident model and process (STAMP) and its nested accident analysis technique, i.e., causal analysis based on systems theory (CAST), to propose a causal incident analysis in the railway industry. The study proposes a hierarchical safety control structure, along with system-level safety constraints, and detailed investigations of the system’s components with the purpose of identifying physical and organizational safety requirements and safety recommendations. The analysis is contextualized in the demonstrative use of a railway case. In particular, the analysis is instantiated for a 2011 incident in the United Kingdom (UK) railway system. Hence, the CAST technique requires information regarding incidents, facts and processes. Therefore, the case study under analysis provided the information to analyze the accidents based on system theory, in which the results of the analysis prove the benefits of a CAST application to highlight criticalities at both element- and system-level, spanning from component failure to organizational and maintenance planning, enhancing safety performance in normal work practices.

This paper presents a literature survey coupled with a standards survey as standpoints to develop a new facility management model based on the multi-service result-oriented approach. To prevent the most popular pitfalls in the field, the model focuses on customer satisfaction and, broadly speaking, on performance control, by embedding the customer–supplier relationship within the six-sigma framework and by suggesting the define, measure, analyse, improve and control (DMAIC) methodology. The applicability of the proposed model to the industrial environment is validated through an extensive survey on small- and medium-sized Italian enterprises: results point out that the majority of companies are well aware of the opportunities offered by the facility management discipline, but they are not still able to fully exploit these opportunities. Finally, two case studies coming from the healthcare industry further witness the applicability of the proposed model even in some particular industries, and confirmed the relevant potential improvements of the customer–supplier relationship when dealing with facilities-related services