Infrastructure such as transportation networks improves the condition of everyday
lives by facilitating public services and systems necessary for economic activity and
growth. However, constructing and maintaining transportation infrastructure poses
safety hazards and risks to those working at the sharp end, leading to serious injuries
and fatalities. Therefore, the identification of hazards and managing the risks they
create is integral towards continually improving safety levels in Infrastructure
Management.
This work seeks to fully understand this problem and highlight past, present and
future issues concerning safety in a comprehensive literature review.
A decision support tool is proposed to improve the safety of transportation workers
by facilitating hazard identification and management of associated control measures.
This Tool facilitates the extraction of safety knowledge from real paper-based safety
documents, capturing existing worker’s knowledge and experiences from industrial
‘corporate memory’. The Tool suggests the most appropriate control measures for
new scenarios based on existing knowledge from previous work tasks. This is
achieved by classifying work tasks using a new method based on unilateral UK
legislation (Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences (1995)
Regulations) and the innovative use of Artificial Intelligence method Case Based
Reasoning. Case Based Reasoning (CBR) allows transparency in the Tool processes
and has many benefits over other safety tools which may suffer from ‘black box’
stigmatism.
The Tool is populated with knowledge extracted from a real transportation project
and is hosted via the internet (www.Total-Safety.com). The end product of the Tool is the generation of bespoke method statements detailing
appropriate control measures. These generated paper documents are shown to have
financial and quality control benefits over traditional method statements. The Tool
has undergone testing and analysis and is shown to be robust.
Finally, the overall conclusions and opportunities for further research are presented
and progress of the work against each of the five research objectives is assessed