Campbell, J M (2008) Safety hazard and risk identification and management in infrastructure management. PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, UK.
Abstract
Infrastructure such as transportation networks improves the condition of everyday lives by facilitating public services and systems necessary for economic activity and growth. However, constructing and maintaining transportation infrastructure poses safety hazards and risks to those working at the sharp end, leading to serious injuries and fatalities. Therefore, the identification of hazards and managing the risks they create is integral to continually improving safety levels in infrastructure management. This work seeks to fully understand this problem and highlight past, present and future issues concerning safety in a comprehensive literature review. A decision support tool is proposed to improve the safety of transportation workers by facilitating hazard identification and management of associated control measures. This Tool facilitates the extraction of safety knowledge from real paper-based safety documents, capturing existing worker’s knowledge and experiences from industrial ‘corporate memory’. The Tool suggests the most appropriate control measures for new scenarios based on existing knowledge from previous work tasks. This is achieved by classifying work tasks using a new method based on unilateral UK legislation (Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences (1995) Regulations) and the innovative use of artificial intelligence method, case-based reasoning (CBR). CBR allows transparency in the tool processes and has many benefits over other safety tools which may suffer from ’black box’ stigmatism. The tool is populated with knowledge extracted from a real transportation project and is hosted via the internet (www.Total-Safety.com). The end product of the tool is the generation of bespoke method statements detailing appropriate control measures. These paper documents are shown to have financial and quality control benefits over traditional method statements. The tool has undergone testing and analysis and is shown to be robust. Finally, the overall conclusions and opportunities for further research are presented and progress of the work against each of the five research objectives is assessed.
| Item Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | maintenance; transportatipon; safety; risk management; artificial intelligence; prototype development |
| Index terms: | regulation, documents, legislation, case-based reasoning, decision support, injury, prototype, transportation project, literature review, risk identification, transportation infrastructure, risk management, testing, quality control, internet, fatalities, economic activity, transparency, artificial intelligence, infrastructure management, public services, hazard identification |
| Subjects: | risk assessment, computing systems, modelling and simulation, data analysis and analytics, legal systems, professional practice, artificial intelligence, economic analysis, project delivery, health risk and incident analysis, infrastructure engineering, financial risk, professional development, decision analysis, cognitive psychology, health conditions and diseases, infrastructure and transport systems, administrative law, political science |
| Topics: | Quality Management, Legal Issues, Risk Management, Engineering Principles, Health and Safety, Digital Applications, Governance, Research Practice, Information Management, Business Strategy, Cost Management |
| Descriptive scope: | 4 PCTA |
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