Abstract: In order to obtain more reasonable health damage assessment results and identify the most significant factors, a probabilistic risk assessment model was built based on the Monte Carlo simulation and the deterministic health damage assessment method. The health damage level of coal dust was evaluated at four workplaces of a certain coal mine in China, such as coal mining face, heading face, shotcrete point and transshipment point. And, a sensitivity analysis was conducted to analyze the influence of each variable parameter. The results show that for the four workplaces in the coal mine, coal dust health damage has a logarithm normal distribution. The coal miners at heading face are exposed to the highest health damage, followed by coal mining face and shotcrete point, the last is transshipment point. Sensitivity analysis indicate that exposure duration, exposure time, inhalation rate and coal dust concentration at various workplaces have a decisive effect on the evaluation results. The optimization model is effective in solving the uncertainty problem of coal dust occupational health damage assessment.

Key words: uncertainty, coal dust, Monte Carlo simulation, health damage assessment, probabilistic risk model