A conceptual framework for resilience engineering in construction safety

Poor safety performance is a chronic problem that plagues the U.S. construction industry. Some researchers contend that accidents are the result of disruptions. Disruptions are those happenings that interrupt, or disturb, the normal course of work. The overarching goal of this study is to explore schemes and methods to understand, harness, and foresee disturbances that arise from demands placed on the construction operations of project-based organizations that deliver the built environment. This study examines the emerging paradigm of Resilience Engineering (RE) as a means to avoid, mitigate, and recover from disruptions, considering these as the bell weather of untoward happenings on construction projects that endanger worker safety. The ways that RE differs from traditional thinking about dealing with disruptions, the current principles and practices of RE, elements of RE useful to construction projects, and simulation of RE were critical elements addressed in this work. RE is an emerging discipline that has been described as a paradigm shift about safety. The RE approach recognizes the need for a progressive safety plan that is systems-based, sociotechnical in its outlook, views work as a complex activity, and is concurrently reactive and proactive in its vigilance to prevent accidents. In the RE outlook safety is a core value of the organization. RE looks for ways to balance the tensions among ongoing production and economic pressures and safety, recognizing the need to pull back or stifle production when safety is threatened. A basic premise of RE maintains that adjustments are needed in systems given that performance conditions are always underspecified. To be considered resilient, a system must possess the abilities of anticipation, monitoring, response, and learning. This work includes an extensive literature review, development of a framework that describes how RE might be deployed in a construction setting, and a hybrid computer simulation employing agent-based and discrete event modeling that demonstrates the RE principle of the Efficiency-Thoroughness Trade-Off (ETTO). The literature review revealed that RE has a rich history that is solidly built upon and expands previous approaches to system disruption in general and safety management in particular. The framework developed utilized the literature review and focused on translating RE premises and principles to the construction industry. The main thesis of the work posits that the key features needed for construction companies to act resiliently are for executives to consider resilience as a quality of the system, to consider RE as a definitive positional strategy, to develop a "just" culture to support RE implementation, and to view construction systems functionally as opposed to structurally. Additionally, the framework offers guidance and instruction with regard to the essential abilities of anticipation, monitoring, response, and learning. Finally, the hybrid computer simulation proved to be a worthy exemplar of the possibility for agents with resilient behaviors to populate and act in a simulated discrete-event production setting beset with disruptions. Given that RE is an emerging paradigm, hybrid computer simulation may provide a useful tool for researchers to scaffold as this concept is carried forward.