Integration of safety risk data with highway construction schedules BEHZAD ESMAEILI* and MATTHEW HALLOWELL Department of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering, University of Colorado at Boulder, 428 UCB, 1111 Engineering Drive, Boulder, CO 80303, USA Received 29 March 2012; accepted 9 October 2012 The construction industry is characterized by a relatively high injury and illness rate compared to other industries. Within the construction industry, the highway construction and maintenance sector is one of the most dangerous. To improve safety in this sector, proactive methods of safety improvement and reliable risk data are needed. The safety risk quantification is the first step towards integrating safety data into design and planning. To enhance the current preconstruction safety practices, safety risks of highway construction and maintenance tasks were quantified and a decision support system was developed and tested that inte- grates safety risk data into the project schedules. Relative safety risks were quantified for 25 common highway construction tasks using the Delphi method. To ensure valid and reliable results, experts were selected according to rigorous requirements and multiple controls were employed to decrease cognitive biases. The data were incorporated into a decision support system called Scheduled-based Safety Risk Assessment and Management (SSRAM) that facilitates integration of safety risk data with project schedules. The resulting data-driven system produces predictive plots of safety risk over time based on the temporal and spatial interactions among concurrent activities. To test the utility of the decision support system and the validity of the underlying risk data, the system was tested on 11 active case study projects in the US. It was found that the database and associated decision support tool produce accurate and reliable risk forecasts that increase the viability of existing safety preconstruction activities. Keywords: Decision support systems, occupational health and safety, risk management, scheduling. Introduction Typically, safety management activities take place during the construction phase (e.g. job hazard analy- ses and site audits). In recent years, new safety man- agement strategies have been introduced that help the project team to identify and control hazards during design and preconstruction. However, according to Szymberski (1997), the potential to influence site safety and health conditions decreases exponentially as the project commences. Recent research has con- firmed these findings and indicates that the most effective safety programme elements occur during the programming and preconstruction phases (Rajendran and Gambatese, 2009). Unfortunately, the current methods for considering safety and health in these early phases are inconsistent, informal, and based primarily on intuition and judgment (Hallowell, 2008). Thus, there is clearly a need to enhance pre- construction safety management strategies, to create user-friendly tools, and to increase their use in all sectors of the industry. One of the preconstruction methods that has been shown to be highly effective is the integration of the safety aspect into project schedules using risk data (Yi and Langford, 2006). Unfortunately, integration is limited because of a lack of data for specific con- struction work tasks and the lack of reliable tools that interface with existing scheduling software. The cur- rent study aims to test the theory that loading safety risk data into the project schedule is practical and will improve predictions of high risk work periods. The objectives are to (1) quantify relative safety risk values for common highway construction activities; (2) *Author for correspondence. E-mail: behzad.esmaeili@colorado.edu Construction Management and Economics, 2013 Vol. 31, No. 6, 528–541, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01446193.2012.739288 Ó 2013 Taylor & Francis Downloaded by [University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries] at 10:37 05 September 2013