What Makes a Project Safe? Identifying the Impacts Factors Have on the Safety Performance of a Construction Site through Use of Artificial Neural Networks

• Author / Creator

  Cooper, Lance E

• What makes a construction project safe? This question prompted this research project. The goal
  was to identify factors and quantify their impact on the safety performance of construction
  projects. The first step in achieving this goal was to research key performance indicators in the
  area of safety and to identify common factors associated with safety in construction. A list of
  factors was created and presented to building construction industry members to establish
  causation for the factors and to eliminate any factors that did not have available data. The set of
  revised factors was not adequate to represent a construction project and did not fully capture the
  nature of their safety aspects. Safety professionals were interviewed to determine additional
  factors that were associated with the behavior of personnel on building sector construction sites.
  Historical data was collected from projects completed by a construction contractor, and this data
  was used to represent the revised list of factors that had been established with input from
  industry members. The project managers from the projects were surveyed to obtain data for the
  other factors identified through the interviews conducted with safety professionals. Using the
  historical data and information collected from surveys, a feed forward-backward artificial neural
  network was developed to analyze data and identify the impact that each of the factors had on
  safety performance. The neural network used a sigmoid transfer function with a single hidden
  layer. Three unique configurations of models were experimented with. Each configuration used
  the same data that was collected from historical project information and the surveys of project
  managers, as well as the same network topography; however, how the data was organized
  changed with each configuration. The results from each configuration had some variation but
  showed similar findings. The factors with the highest importance amongst all three
  configurations were factors that related to safety inspections and project manager mentoring.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Constructions
  • Neural Networks
  • Construction Safety
  • Safety

• Graduation date

  Spring 2015

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Science

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3Z02ZH6H

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.