BARRIERS TO THE ADOPTION OF NEW SAFETY TECHNOLOGIES IN CONSTRUCTION: A DEVELOPING COUNTRY CONTEXT

The adoption rate of new technologies is still relatively low in the construction industry, particularly for mitigating occupational safety and health (OSH) risks, which is traditionally a largely labor-intensive activity in developing countries, occupying ill-afforded non-productive management resources. However, understanding why this is the case is a relatively unresearched area in developing countries such as Malaysia. In aiming to help redress this situation, this study explored the major barriers involved, firstly by a detailed literature review to identify the main barriers hampering the adoption of new technologies for safety science and management in construction. Then, a questionnaire survey of Malaysian construction practitioners was used to prioritize these barriers. A factor analysis further identified six major dimensions underlying the barriers, relating to the lack of OSH regulations and legislation, technological limitations, lack of genuine organizational commitment, prohibitive costs, poor safety culture within the construction industry, and privacy and data security concerns. Taken together, the findings provide a valuable reference to assist industry practitioners and researchers regarding the critical barriers to the adoption of new technologies for construction safety management in Malaysia and other similar developing countries, and bridge the identified knowledge gap concerning the dimensionality of the barriers.

Construction safety ontology development and alignment with industry foundation classes (IFC)

A pronounced gap often exists between expected and actual safety performance in the construction industry. The multifaceted causes of this performance gap are resulting from the misalignment between design assumptions and actual construction processes that take place on-site. In general, critical factors are rooted in the lack of interoperability around the building and work-environment information due to its heterogeneous nature. To overcome the interoperability challenge in safety management, this paper represents the development of an ontological model consisting of terms and relationships between these terms, creating a conceptual information model for construction safety management and linking that ontology to IfcOWL. The developed ontology, named Safety and Health Exchange (SHE), comprises eight concepts and their relationships required to identify and manage safety risks in the design and planning stages. The main concepts of the developed ontology are identified based on reviewing accident cases from 165 Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations (RIDDOR) and 31 Press Releases from the database of the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) in the United Kingdom. Consequently, a semantic mapping between the developed ontology and IfcOWL (the most popular ontology and schema for interoperability in the AEC sector) is proposed. Then several SPARQL queries were developed and implemented to evaluate the semantic consistency of the developed ontology and the cross-mapping. The proposed ontology and cross-mapping gained recognition for its innovation in utilising OpenBIM and won the BuildingSMART professional research award 2020. This work could facilitate developing a knowledge-based system in the BIM environment to assist designers in addressing health and safety issues during the design and planning phases in the construction sector.

Research on Unsafe Behavior of Construction Workers Under the Bidirectional Effect of Formal Rule Awareness and Conformity Mentality

At present, China’s engineering safety management has developed to a certain level, but the number of casualties caused by construction accidents is still increasing in recent years, and the safety problems in the construction industry are still worrying. For purpose of effectively reducing construction workers’ unsafe behavior and improve the efficiency of construction safety management, based on multi-agent modeling, this paper analyzes the influencing factors during construction workers’ cognitive process from the perspective of safety cognition, constructs the interaction and cognition of the agent under the bidirectional effect of formal rule awareness and conformity mentality model, and set behavior rules and parameters through the Net Logo platform for simulation. The results show that: Unsafe behavior of construction workers is related to the failure of cognitive process, and the role of workers’ psychology and consciousness will affect the cognitive process; The higher the level of conformity intention of construction workers, the easier it is to increase the unsafe behavior of the group; Formal rule awareness can play a greater role only when the management standard is at a high level, and can correct the workers’ safety cognition and effectively correct the workers’ unsafe behavior; Under certain construction site environmental risks, the interaction between formal rule awareness and conformity mentality in an appropriate range is conducive to the realization of construction project life cycle management. This study has certain theoretical and practical significance for in-depth understanding of safety cognition and reducing unsafe behavior of construction team.

Sensor Modules for Enhancement of Safety Performance in Construction Safety Management

Safety management is very important for construction sector as it is the most hazardous working environments when it comes to occupational fatalities. The high cases such as injuries at the workplace, illnesses, and fatalities often caused harm to the workers and create the delay on the work progress. Therefore, this paper reviewed the whole operation process of the sensor modules that enhanced safety performance to prevent accidents occurred on construction site. By providing lab scale location-based safety management services to the workers, this technology able to allow a speedy response in the event of accident. From the benchmark conducted, there are three study that had been conducted previously using vibrational alert signal which identified as an accurate transmitted especially inside a danger zone, as the vibrational function of the sensor module able to function within the designated range. The second benchmark shows that previous study able to identify errors in the location information of the workers arising from obstacles, even though so the technology able to conveyed within the designated range as well. Thirdly, the previous study able to shows the information of a fall was conveyed quickly upon occurrence, and the previous study showed that fall able to identified using the context-aware information from the sensor module. The findings showed that the real-time location and context-aware information collected from the sensor module can be used to prevent accidents and respond quickly in the event of a fall. However, the vibration signal which generated by sensor module was insufficient to alert the workers when approaching the danger zone at construction site. Therefore to improve the whole development of prototype sensor module a further study is needed to incorporate the vibrational and alarm signal for recognising accidents upon occurred for enhancement safety management at construction sites.