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Previous research regarding shaping factors and major causes behind accidents in the construction field is reviewed. In particular, a hypothetical model is established to correlate activity time, cost and safety in the context of construction activity acceleration planning. Two demonstration cases are presented to illustrate the proposed theoretical model in the context of critical activity expedition planning. Further, a third case uses a 100-activity project to perform the global level total project time and cost analysis, identifying specific activity acceleration plans that would materialize the shortened total project time at the lowest total project cost.

This research proposes a safety-centric application framework to guide construction acceleration planning at both activity and project levels while taking sufficient preventive measures against safety hazards and accidents. As planning construction acceleration by factoring in safety constraints inevitably drives up cost, it is imperative to control increases in activity costs at the local level in connection with schedule acceleration planning while at the same time not compromising on safety. This research also addresses this critical question through performing global level total project time and cost analysis.

An application framework is proposed for guiding a planner through identifying accident shaping factors, obeying schedule acceleration rules and accounting for safety-related costs in attempts to mitigate hazardous situations on-site at both activity level (local) and project level (global), resulting in (1) minimizing the increase of total project cost in schedule acceleration while at the same time not compromising on safety at individual activities; (2) producing specific execution plans on each individual activity in terms of the amount of time to crash and the associated activity cost.

This study is original in developing theories and methods for evaluating the impact of safety constraints upon construction time and cost in activity acceleration planning and project time-cost analysis. The research fills a gap in knowledge in terms of how to factor in sufficient safety constraints while achieving project time and cost objectives on construction acceleration planning at both activity and project levels.

The purpose is to introduce a safety planning and control (SPC) model that has been integrated into the production planning and control process. The paper is concerned with the impact of this model on human error control, since both workers' and managers' errors are major contributing factors in accident causation.

The analysis of this impact was based on two stages: the analysis of the main types of human errors detected in five sites in which the model has been implemented and a discussion on how the model contributes to the design of safe work systems from a cognitive engineering perspective.

The main conclusion is that six elements of the model (safety planning, near miss reporting, training, percentage of safe work packages indicator, participatory cycle, and planning and control diffusion) contribute to make both the boundaries of safe work visible and respected. Safety planning also helps to make the production system error‐tolerant to some extent. However, the analysis of causes of safety failures in the empirical studies pointed out a high incidence of violations of the boundaries (on average, 43.5 percent of the total safety failures), mostly by workers.

Although improvement in the existing mechanisms might make the model more behavior‐oriented, a broader set of measures is necessary to achieve excellence in dealing with human errors. Also, additional empirical data are necessary to clarify the nature and frequency of the human errors that have impact in construction safety.

The model may help in devising more effective tools to reduce errors in construction.

Safety planning in construction project management is separated from other planning functions, such as scheduling. This separation creates difficulties for safety engineers to analyse what, when, why and where safety measures are needed for preventing accidents. Another problem occurs due to the conventional practice of representing project designs using two‐dimensional (2D) drawings. In this practice, an engineer has to convert the 2D drawings into three‐dimensional (3D) mental pictures which is a tedious task. Since this conversion is already difficult, combining these 2D drawings with safety plans increases the difficulty. In order to address the problems, 4DCAD‐Safety is proposed. This paper discusses the design and development of 4DCAD‐Safety application and testing its usefulness in terms of assisting users in analysing what, when, where and why safety measures are needed.

In order to ensure the public safety of residential areas, starting with the urban public safety of Xi'an, the construction environment of defense safety, fire safety and traffic safety, and the public safety environment of residential areas are investigated. According to the characteristics of housing in Xi'an planned economy era and market economy era, the existing situation is analyzed from the aspects of overall planning layout, road traffic space, building monomer, public activity space, greening space, and lighting facilities. Based on the analysis results, the principles of planning and design of public safety space environment in Xi'an residential areas are put forward. The planning and design methods of residential space environment are discussed and studied in detail from the aspects of residential defense safety, fire safety, and traffic safety, so as to provide reference for the planning and design of urban residential safety and to create a safe, healthy and harmonious living environment for residents.

In order to reduce the number of injuries on construction sites, a European Directive prescribes that the clients shall appoint safety and health coordinators in their projects. The purpose of this paper is to find out who are appointed to be health and safety coordinators for the design and planning phase and what they do in order to prevent injuries on sites.

Since the 1st of January 2009, there shall be a coordinator for the design and planning phase in Swedish construction projects. Telephone interviews were made with the coordinators in 42 Swedish building projects.

The coordinators’ education and experiences varied widely, as well as their descriptions of their duties: no duties, administration and active injury prevention. The coordinators who were classified as most active had at least one additional leading role in the projects.

The study is qualitative for an increased understanding, not a statistical reflection of the coordinator population.

The legislation needs to clarify whether the early conceptual phase of the project is included in the coordinator's commission and whether she/he is supposed to participate in identifying, assessing and reducing risks through design changes. These clarifications will have an influence on when the coordinator should be appointed and what competence she/he needs.

The study increases the understanding of how the health and safety coordinators of the planning and projecting phase of building projects perceive their mission and what factors, according to them, have an influence on what they do.

The purpose of this paper is to present an exploratory study in order to understand the contributions of the resilience engineering (RE) concept and the use of unmanned aerial systems (UASs) technology to support the safety planning and control (SPC) process.

A case study on a construction project was conducted and involved the following steps: diagnosis of the SPC process; development of a safety monitoring protocol using UASs; and field tests to monitor safety performance using UASs and data analysis.

In terms of its theoretical contribution, this work presents a conceptual framework explaining how the RE and the UASs can contribute to the SPC process. Also, this paper provides, as a practical contribution, a protocol for safety monitoring with UASs integrated into the safety routine, highlighting the tasks that can be checked and unsafe conditions and safety/production conflicts identified through monitoring.

This study can be used to support and stimulate the construction managers who wish to adopt the RE concepts and UAS technology to improve safety management.

An efficient SPC process can improve the work conditions at construction sites, contributing with the reduction of accidents rates.

The paper highlights the need to adopt new approaches, as RE concepts and UAS technology to support the SPC process, in order to improve safety conditions at construction sites.

Building construction is considered a complex, dynamic and highly hazardous process, which embraces many factors that are potentially dangerous to workers. Many studies proved that the improvement of preventive and proactive measures – dynamically included in the building design, planning and construction – could reduce site accidents as well as increase the site productivity. In this context, process management models and information visualization techniques such as building information modeling (BIM) and virtual reality (VR) seem to be devoted to strongly contribute to the advancement of the current safety management practices. For these reasons, the presented contribution is based on the assumption that a more nuanced approach for construction worker's safety training is warranted and the authors propose a safety training protocol based on BIM-enabled VR activity simulations.

The methodology comprised a safety training protocol based on BIM-enabled VR activity simulations. The protocol addresses three methodological issues: (1) Planning in terms of training typologies and related health and safety contents to be implemented in the VR construction site scenarios; (2) Management regarding the solution to integrate BIM and game technologies to deliver VR training experiences; (3) Administration in terms of definition of standardized rules to define a safety training schedule in a given construction project.

This work contributes to provide a standardized protocol for a viable integration of BIM and VR technologies for construction safety training in real projects.

The VR training protocol was applied to a construction project based in Italy that served as case study for the development of the training sessions' contents and their implementation. This case demonstrated the feasibility of the protocol's implementation and pointed out the drawbacks and limitations on which further efforts need to be spent in order to take the proposed protocol from a prototypical stage to a maturity for its larger-scale adoption from the practitioners involved in construction safety training.

The research gives a contribution to reduce the currently existing knowledge gap regarding how BIM and VR can be simultaneously integrated in real projects for construction safety training by using standardized rules to be extensively reproduced in different construction projects. It uses a customized toolkit with a mobile smartphone solution to administer Safety Training Scenarios which increases its portability in construction site compared to PC-based VR solutions.

Globally, several studies have shown that hospital building is charged with multiple inherent risks because a large number of users are vulnerable in tragic events. Thus, the need for the fire safety management plan (FSMP) has been proved as an instrument to mitigate fire and related risks in healthcare facilities. In Malaysia, FSMP regarding public healthcare building is yet to be explored in-depth. Therefore, this paper explores the information necessary to develop the FSMP framework for public hospital buildings.

The paper’s objectives were accomplished via a combination of five face-to-face interviews and observations of five selected public hospitals in Pulau Pinang, Malaysia. The five key participants were across the five public hospitals and collated data analysed through thematic analysis with the assistance of MAXQDA 2018.

Findings show that fire safety stakeholders practice system, fire safety action plan and fire risk management were the three main variables that promote fire safety programme and will improve FSMP for Malaysia’s public hospital buildings.

This paper’s data collection is limited to Penang, Malaysia, and a qualitative research approach was used, but this does not deteriorate the strength of the findings. Future studies are needed to consider validating findings from this paper via a quantitative approach.

The suggested framework can be employed by Malaysia’s public hospital authorities as a guideline to mitigate fire hazards in the country’s healthcare facilities.

This paper is encouraging hospital operators and other key stakeholders to improve on their FSMP for healthcare buildings across Malaysia as part of the study implications.

This paper reports some interim findings from organisational research into site fire safety which looks at the relevance of Contractor and Facilities Manager attitudes to safety as a component of the overall safety process. Presents a discussion on some of the practical problems associated with Facilities Managers managing the maintenance of fire safety during alterations works. Commences with an illustration of the Facilities Management context of site fire safety that draws upon a number of relevant fire events. It is intended to provoke a wider debate on the relevance of the Facilities Management role in protecting the business. A Project Safety Plan checklist is suggested for Facilities Managers, based on the authors’ review of existing construction site fire safety guidance and codes of practice. Explores a broadening of the Facilities Management role, as interface manager, which in most cases of refurbishment and alterations will constitute the common managerial link to the core business.