Investigation into the development of a human reliability analysis framework for the safety management of construction projects

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Khalid, U., 2022. Investigation into the development of a human reliability analysis framework for the safety management of construction projects. PhD, Nottingham Trent University.

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Abstract

Despite the fact that the construction industry is well-known for its enormous economic contribution to the country, the high fatality rate remains a major source of concern for construction professionals. The hazardous, fragmented, cost-driven, and dynamic nature of the industry has been identified as the primary contributor to the construction industry's compromised safety. Despite several initiatives from the government, safety regulatory bodies, and safety professionals to improve safety management, statistics show that occupational safety performance is still unacceptable. In fact, the construction industry is still grappling with identifying the critical factors influencing safety performance. Consequently, contemporary practices are incapable of dealing with the current H&S challenges. To overcome safety issues, it is critical to integrate underlying safety factors affecting safety performance into safety management systems. As a result of the aforementioned issues, the goal of this study was to investigate the underlying factors influencing safety performance in the UK construction industry and propose a framework to address the shortcomings by incorporating advanced immersive technologies for H&S management.

This study took a systematic approach, first identifying the critical factors that have a significant impact on the safety performance of construction projects through a detailed literature review, which served as the foundation for developing an initial framework. These factors were classified into several clusters, which included organisational, managerial, legislative, social, environmental, and personnel considerations. Human/personnel factors were discovered to have a significant impact on occupational health and safety on construction projects, accounting for approximately 80% of construction site accidents; thus, the underlying factors were investigated further in this study. In order to supplement the findings of the literature review, a mixed-method approach was used to scope the working framework for overcoming the H&S challenges influencing safety performance. This involved conducting a total of 34 questionnaire research which helped to refine the research findings and shaped the proposed framework to assess human error in construction projects. Afterwards, a qualitative approach involving semi-structured interviews was used to validate the proposed framework. In total, 20 experts took part in the interviews, and the results were compared to the initial findings to validate the research findings, as well as the proposed framework, was shown to the participants to validate its working.

The research findings suggested that the leading causes of human error are human personnel traits such as human behaviour, attitude, risk assessment, experience, and hazard assessment. Furthermore, to investigate the occurrence of human error, accident causation models have been studied to analyse the relationship between the latent and proximal human factors. The human reliability analysis (HRA) technique was used to manage human error in construction projects. Several HRA techniques have been examined to determine the best fit framework and the proposed framework was created using the HRA technique, which has been proven to be an effective method in safety-critical industries. Furthermore, immersive technology has been proposed and integrated into the novel framework to develop a viable safety management framework. The proposed immersive safety management framework was validated by respondents.

Item Type:	Thesis
Creators:	Khalid, U.
Date:	June 2022
Rights:	This work is the intellectual property of the Author, Umair Khalid. You may copy up to 5% of this work for private study, or personal, non-commercial research. Any reuse of the information contained within this document should be fully referenced, quoting the author, title, university, degree level, and pagination. Queries or requests for any other use, or if a more substantial copy is required, should be directed to the owner of the Intellectual Property Rights.
Divisions:	Schools > School of Architecture, Design and the Built Environment
Record created by:	Linda Sullivan
Date Added:	14 Feb 2023 12:28
Last Modified:	14 Feb 2023 12:28
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/48285