Analysis of the impact of building shape on safety accidents

Abstract

Preventing various types of safety accidents on construction sites with safety control efforts centered around site engineers has limitations. To resolve this issue, efforts have been made for the last decade to identify safety risk elements that arise during construction and have them reflected in the Design for Safety (DfS). Taking two buildings with the same total floor area for example, the building with a more complex shape or higher floors is expected to have a higher probability of safety accidents in DfS terms. However, little research is available that has used safety accident data from real construction to analyze the impact of building shape on safety accidents. One of the reasons is that many construction companies do not disclose safety accident data. The purpose of this study is to analyze the impact of building shape on safety accidents. For this research, actual project data collection including safety accidents and analysis on their correlation with each risk element were performed in series. As a result, it was demonstrated that R2 was 0.947 for the correlation between shape factor and safety accidents and R2 was 0.881 for the correlation between the number of building floors and safety accidents, showing that safety accidents are closely related to both elements. It is recommended according to the research findings that designers should take into account of building shape in order to perform more effective DfS and developers and constructors should add more safety facilities and manpower depending on building shape for the same total floor area.