Cooke, T; Lingard, H and Blismas, N (2007) On-line oh&s risk assessment for construction designers: The 'toolshed' prototype. In: Boyd, D (ed.) Proceedings of 23rd Annual ARCOM Conference, 3-5 September 2007, Belfast, UK.
Abstract
Many occupational health and safety (OH&S) problems encountered during the construction, operation and maintenance of a facility could be avoided by ensuring that sound risk management practices are adopted during the design stage. OH&S risks identified after the completion of the detailed design stage of a construction project are often more difficult to eliminate or reduce and can also result in unnecessary costs and delays to the project. While some effort has been made to assist designers to integrate OH&S into their decision-making, existing guidelines rely on the ability of the designer to identify, assess and appropriately control 'foreseeable' risks. The effectiveness of the design OH&S concept is heavily reliant on a designer’s knowledge and competence in risk management. Not only do designers need to be aware of the features of their design that constitute OH&S hazards, but they need to know how to implement a risk management process to assess the magnitude of the risk presented by these hazards and make sensible decisions about how OH&S risks should be treated. A prototype web-based, knowledge-based system (KBS) has been constructed, that provides a step-by-step risk assessment consultation for construction designers. This consultation can be undertaken by designers with minimal understanding of risk management concepts. The program uses a simple but effective way of modelling expert reasoning in the assessment of OH&S risk and replicates the decision-making of experts in design OH&S, with input from experienced 'users' of design outputs, i.e. constructors, facilities managers and maintenance personnel.
| Item Type: | Conference Paper (Paper) |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | knowledge-based systems; maintenance; oh&s; risk management; safe design |
| Index terms: | occupational health and safety, reasoning, construction project, decision-making, design stage, personnel, modelling, designer, knowledge-based system, facilities manager, effectiveness, competence, risk assessment, operation and maintenance, prototype, risk management, program |
| Subjects: | financial risk, software systems, cognitive psychology, management, decision analysis, practitioner, personnel development, performance management, maintenance engineering, modelling and simulation, risk assessment, professional practice, artificial intelligence, profession, occupational health and safety management, analytical methods, production management |
| Topics: | Health and Safety, Cost Management, Project Management, Business Strategy, Human Resources, Research Practice, Design Practice, Engineering Principles, Risk Management, Quality Management, Digital Applications, Roles and Professions |
| Descriptive scope: | 2 PC |
N.B. Descriptive scope is a count of how many of the five facets of empirical research are indicated by the words used in title, abstract and keywords. It is not intended as a judgement on the research; merely a count of the kind of word we would expect to indicate Phenomenon, Concepts, Theoretical framing, Empirical techniques, Analytical techniques. If all five are present, then a code of “5 PCTEA” will indicate this. If you feel the coding for this record is questionable, we welcome discussion around the terms we matched or the way we categorized them. The facet you would expect may not be coded, or a facet may be coded inappropriately. This can also bear on a larger question, of which facets should be treated as defining in construction management research. Please get in touch, and we will look at it. More details here