Understanding the relationship between safety investment and safety performance of construction projects through agent-based modeling

Authored by Miaojia Lu, Clara Man Cheung, Heng Li, Shu-Chien Hsu

Date Published: 2016

DOI: 10.1016/j.aap.2016.05.014

Sponsors: No sponsors listed

Platforms: NetLogo

Model Documentation: Other Narrative

Model Code URLs: Model code not found

Abstract

The construction industry in Hong Kong increased its safety investment by 300\% in the past two decades; however, its accident rate has plateaued to around 50\% for one decade. Against this backdrop, researchers have found inconclusive results on the causal relationship between safety investment and safety performance. Using agent-based modeling, this study takes an unconventional bottom-up approach to study safety performance on a construction site as an outcome of a complex system defined by interactions among a worksite, individual construction workers, and different safety investments. Instead of focusing on finding the absolute relationship between safety investment and safety performance, this study contributes to providing a practical framework to investigate how different safety investments interacting with different parameters such as human and environmental factors could affect safetyperformance. As a result, we could identify cost-effective safety investments under different construction scenarios for delivering optimal safety performance. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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Climate Management systems Building-projects Coworker support Contractors