Unsafe behavior is a critical factor leading to construction accidents. Despite numerous studies supporting this viewpoint, the process by which accidents are influenced by construction workers’ unsafe behaviors and the extent to which unsafe behaviors are involved in this process remain poorly discussed. Therefore, this paper selects cases from Chinese building construction accidents to explore the probabilistic transmission paths from unsafe behaviors to accidents using a Bayesian network. First, a list of unsafe behaviors is constructed based on safety standards and operating procedures. Second, several chains of unsafe behaviors are extracted from 287 accident cases within four types (fall, collapse, struck-by and lifting) to form a Bayesian network model. Finally, two accidents are specifically analyzed to verify the rationality of the proposed model through forward reasoning. Additionally, critical groups of unsafe behaviors leading to the four types of accidents are identified through backward reasoning. The results show the following: (i) The time sequence of unsafe behaviors in a chain does not affect the final posterior probability of an accident, but the accident attribute strength of an unsafe behavior, affects the growth rate of the posterior probability of an accident. (ii) The four critical groups of unsafe behaviors leading to fall, collapse, struck-by, and lifting are identified. This study is of theoretical and practical significance for on-site behavioral management and accident prevention.
Various construction accidents are proven to be caused by multiple unsafe behaviors (e.g., wrong use of PPE), but the risk transmission among different behaviors remains unclear. This paper provides insight into risk transmission through behavioral risk chain that leads to accidents from a system safety perspective. To better understand the coupling mechanism of various unsafe behaviors, integrate different behavioral risk chains and present the risk transmission process, a directed-weighted complex network (DWCN) method was adopted. Historical urban railway construction accidents in China are investigated to extract behavioral risk chain. A DW-BRCNA is applied to integrated behavioral risk chain and the behavioral risk transmission characteristics are explored and clarified by the five network properties, including degree and degree distribution, node strength and node strength distribution, average path length and diameter, weighted clustering coefficient and betweenness centrality. The results show that DW-BRCNA has the characteristics of a small-world, scale-free and hierarchical network, indicating that some unsafe behaviors are of greater importance in the process of risk transmission through behavioral risk chains. In addition, risk transmission in critical behavioral risk chains is more potentially to lead to accidents. This study proposed a new perspective of accident causation analysis from risk transmission among unsafe behaviors. It explains the risk transmission characteristics by a DWCN method based on behavioral risk chains. The findings also provide a practical guidance for developing control strategies on sites to prevent risk transmission and reduce accidents.
PurposeKnowledge discovery related to unsafe behaviors promotes the performance of accident prevention in construction. Although numerous studies on accident causation models have discussed the correlations of unsafe behaviors with various factors (e.g., unsafe conditions), limited research explores correlations between unsafe behaviors within accidents. The purpose of this paper is mining strong association rules of unsafe behaviors from historical accidents to clarify this kind of tacit knowledge.Design/methodology/approachA case study was adopted as the research approach, in which accident records from building and urban railway construction in China were selected as data resources. The groups of unsafe behaviors extracted from accident records were expressed by the definitions of unsafe behaviors from safety regulations and operating procedures. Frequent Pattern (FP)-Growth algorithm was used for association rule mining, and the critical correlations between unsafe behaviors were represented by the effective strong rules.FindingsThe findings identify and distinguish correlations between unsafe behaviors within construction accidents. In building construction, workers and managers should pay attention to preventing unsafe behaviors related to personal protective equipment and machines and equipment. In urban railway construction, workers should especially avoid unsafe behaviors of inadequately dealing with environmental factors.Practical implicationsTacit knowledge is transferred to explicit knowledge as the critical correlations between unsafe behaviors within accidents are determined by the effective strong rules. Additionally, the findings provide practice guidance for safety management, to collaboratively control unsafe behaviors with strong correlations.Originality/valueThis study contributes to the body of safety knowledge in construction and provides a further understanding of how construction accidents are caused by multiple unsafe behaviors.
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