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Nowadays every piece of working equipment and tools has to comply with safety standards and laws. This study investigated multi-criteria methods for selecting working equipment in order to optimize performance and occupational safety. The multi-criteria decision-making (MDCM) method was applied to the problem of selecting optimal working equipment using four different criterion weighting approaches (direct weighting, revised Simos procedure, Fuller’s triangle and analytic hierarchy process). Groups of economic, technical and safety criteria were defined and five weighting scenarios were developed. Although the four weighting methods produced similar results, in some situations they produced different criterion weighting factors. The final output of the MCDM method was the identification of the optimal forklift in the five weighting scenarios. Although we have applied the MCDM method to a forklift selection problem, it can be applied to all sorts of working equipment in contexts where economic, technical and safety selection criteria can be identified. © 2017, © 2017 Central Institute for Labour Protection–National Research Institute (CIOP-PIB).