Integrative Safety-Awareness-Model for the Prevention of Accidents on Construction Sites (iSAM)

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Uwe Rüppel
• Subject Area: Structural Engineering, Building Informatics and Construction Operation
• Term: from 2014 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 253487741

116,689 working accidents happened in the year 2011 on German construction sites. On the human side these accidents have significant consequences for the health of the involved persons. On the economic side this accidents lead to rising costs for the individual construction project and for the whole economy in general. To reduce the number of severe and deadly accidents on construction sites new models and related methods with an integrated approach have to be developed. In this area there are actually only single island solutions for special construction processes: a general model is missing. Therefore, new research work for an integrative model is necessary.The aim of this research proposal is to develop a new integrative model for the prevention of working accidents on construction sites. Many factors and boundary conditions have an influence on the safety of construction processes. Especially, in the area of moving construction vehicles and in the spatial intersection of parallel conducted working processes the risk for accidents is very high. Some individual solutions have been developed for special applications, but an integrative model embracing all applications in terms of enabling an early warning system is missing. In the proposal this new characteristic is called safety-awareness.To close this lack of research the approach in the proposal is as follows for the integrative software-independent formal Safety-Awareness-Model (iSAM): firstly, building process models have to be supplemented with new safety interaction relationships, secondly, safety relevant events have to be identified with sensors and, thirdly, in combination with a new multi-agent-system the early warning functionality has to be implemented. On base of the international respective work in advance of the proposer the working packages are in detail to reach the aims of the this basic research:(1) Identification of reference scenarios for safety relevant building processes with attribute and event data plus specification of the target scenario(2) Detection of requirements and analysis of suitable methods for process modeling, multi-agent -systems and sensors(3) Software-independent formal modeling of the layers of the integrative Safety-Awareness-Model(4) Demonstrator(5) Verification, Validation and dissipation of results and perceptions on base of the target scenario(6) Working report and publications.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants