title: Understanding the relationship between safety investment and safety performance of construction projects through agent-based modeling.
abstract: The construction industry in Hong Kong increased its safety investment by 300% in the past two decades; however, its accident rate has plateaued to around 50% for one decade. Against this backdrop, researchers have found inconclusive results on the causal relationship between safety investment and safety performance. Using agent-based modeling, this study takes an unconventional bottom-up approach to study safety performance on a construction site as an outcome of a complex system defined by interactions among a worksite, individual construction workers, and different safety investments. Instead of focusing on finding the absolute relationship between safety investment and safety performance, this study contributes to providing a practical framework to investigate how different safety investments interacting with different parameters such as human and environmental factors could affect safety performance. As a result, we could identify cost-effective safety investments under different construction scenarios for delivering optimal safety performance.
authors.affiliation: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong.
authors.forename: Miaojia
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Lu
authors.affiliation: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, The University of Maryland, United States.
authors.forename: Clara Man
authors.initials: CM
authors.lastname: Cheung
authors.affiliation: Department of Building and Real Estate, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong.
authors.forename: Heng
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong. Electronic address: mark.hsu@polyu.edu.hk.
authors.forename: Shu-Chien
authors.initials: SC
authors.lastname: Hsu
mesh_terms: D060389:Construction Industry; D006723:Hong Kong; D006801:Humans; D007449:Investments; D016272:Occupational Health; D009934:Organization and Administration; D012449:Safety; D013597:Systems Analysis; D017132:Workplace
keywords: Agent-based modeling; Construction industry; Information technology; Safety investment; Safety performance