Efficient Safety Information Retrieval on Construction Sites: A Preliminary Methodology

IT-supported field data management benefits on-site construction management by improving accessibility to the information and promoting efficient communication between project team members. However, most of on-site safety inspections still heavily rely on subjective judgment and manual reporting processes and thus observers’ experiences often determine the quality of risk identification and control. This study aims to develop a methodology to efficiently retrieve safety-related information so that the safety inspectors can easily access to the relevant site safety information for safer decision making. The proposed methodology consists of three stages: (1) development of a comprehensive safety database which contains information of risk factors, accident types, impact of accidents and safety regulations; (2) identification of relationships among different risk factors based on statistical analysis methods; and (3) user-specified information retrieval using data mining techniques for safety management. This paper presents an overall methodology and preliminary results of the first stage research conducted with 101 accident investigation reports.

[1]  Simon Smith,et al.  Safety hazard identification on construction projects , 2006 .

[2]  Changyoon Kim,et al.  Mobile Computing Platform for Construction Site Management , 2011 .

[3]  Jimmie Hinze,et al.  Autonomous pro-active real-time construction worker and equipment operator proximity safety alert system , 2010 .

[4]  Derek H.T. Walker,et al.  Innovation diffusion at the implementation stage of a construction project: a case study of information communication technology , 2006 .

[5]  Kamel S. Saidi,et al.  The Value of Handheld Computers in Construction , 2002 .

[6]  Seokho Chi,et al.  Image-Based Safety Assessment: Automated Spatial Safety Risk Identification of Earthmoving and Surface Mining Activities , 2012 .

[7]  Anu Pradhan,et al.  Sensing and Field Data Capture for Construction and Facility Operations , 2011 .

[8]  R. Fisher.  Statistical methods for research workers , 1927, Protoplasma.

[9]  A. Agresti.  [A Survey of Exact Inference for Contingency Tables]: Rejoinder , 1992 .

[10]  Burcu Akinci,et al.  A formalism for utilization of sensor systems and integrated project models for active construction quality control , 2006 .

[11]  Vivian W. Y Tam,et al.  Developing a risk assessment model for construction safety , 2010 .

[12]  Yang Miang Goh,et al.  Case-Based Reasoning for Construction Hazard Identification: Case Representation and Retrieval , 2009 .

[13]  R. Fisher,et al.  Statistical Methods for Research Workers. , 1955 .

[14]  Seokho Chi,et al.  Automated Object Identification Using Optical Video Cameras on Construction Sites , 2011, Comput. Aided Civ. Infrastructure Eng..

[15]  Carlos H. Caldas,et al.  Methodology for Automating the Identification and Localization of Construction Components on Industrial Projects , 2009 .