Data Driven Health & Safety Management

Abstract

The construction industry has always been plagued with a high number of accidents and fatalities. The Dutch construction is not an exception in this case and had the highest percentage of workplace accidents among all industries in the national economy, in the year 2019. The high number of accidents and resulting fatalities can be attributed to a plethora of factors. Traditionally, the construction industry has relied on inspections by safety coordinators and supervisors to monitor compliance to the safety regulations by the workers. However, in this manual approach, accuracy of recognizing hazards and making proactive interventions is subject to experience and competency of the supervising personnel and has often proven to be unreliable. Thus, a more objective approach is required to for recognizing hazards and thereby making proactive interventions to prevent accidents.This can only be achieved by analyzing observational data from the construction site in real time. The problem is that with increased use of technology, the sheer volume of data generated by construction projects has surged exponentially. Massive amounts of data are being generated throughout a project’s life cycle but there is a dearth of data management processes which can help construction organizations manage health & safety of workers on construction sites in real time. Thus, this research develops a process map to achieve data driven health & safety management in the construction industry. Various causal factors of accidents in the construction industry and have been identified from literature and co-related with the ones found in archival health & safety data from AECOM Netherlands and opinions of industry experts. The common factors are discerned and later steer the design of the process map. Moreover, type of data, specific data management technologies and best practices to implement these technologies to mitigate the risks, have also been identified. Based on the findings and the researchers’ critical thinking, ten requirement specifications have been formulated. The ten requirement specifications and the identified best practices are then used to design subsets pertaining to the four stages of data management process proposed by Mello et al. (2014), which are data acquisition, data organization, data analytics and data application. Furthermore, an integration framework has been developed, which is used to integrate the individual subsets and develop the final process map. The integrated process map clearly demonstrates checkpoints, placement of data acquisition technologies, data & information flows, actors & responsibilities, to achieve data driven health & safety management on construction sites.The process map is then validated by interviewing experts from construction organizations, which have deployed the innovative technologies used to develop the process map in this research, albeit not in an integrated manner. From the information shared by the experts and their opinions, it has been deduced that the developed process map will secure the construction site against specific risks. Moreover, the developed process is expected to expedite a cultural shift towards a more organized and consistent approach to construction and establish consistency of work environment across an organization’s project portfolio. However, the developed process also has certain shortcomings as well, which in turn may give rise to secondary risks. The findings of this research are not limited to a specific type of construction projects. However, it is more suitable for implementation on large construction projects, in order to realize return on investment. The integrated process is also likely to find suitors in the upstream oil and gas industry, wherein ensuring safety of workers is more complicated. On a holistic level, this research determines that there is immense potential in data acquisition, organization, analytics and application, for the construction industry to exploit. By discerning the primary techniques and real-world solutions, the research establishes the necessary groundwork for the development of a real time health & safety management system, which would help construction organizations in achieving semi-automated management of health and safety conditions on construction sites.