Development of an Expert Model to Assess Falls from Height Hazards in Construction Sites

This paper reports on the current state of an ongoing research project which is aimed at implementing intelligent models for hardly predictable hazard scenarios identification in construction sites. As any programmatic actions cannot deal with the unpredictable nature of many risk dynamics, an attempt to improve the current approach for safety management in the construction industry will be presented in this paper. To this aim, the features offered by Bayesian networks have been exploited. The present research has led to the definition of a probabilistic model using elicitation techniques from subjective knowledge. This model, which might be meant as a reliable knowledge map about accident dynamics, showed that a relevant part of occurrences fall in the “hardly predictable hazards” category, which cannot be warded off by programmatic safety measures. Hence, more effort turned out to be needed in order to manage those hardly predictable hazardous scenarios. Consequently, further developments of this research project will focus on a real time monitoring system for the identification of unpredictable hazardous events in construction.