Analyzing construction safety through time series methods

Abstract

The construction industry produces a large amount of data on a daily basis. However, existing data sets have not been fully exploited in analyzing the safety factors of construction projects. Thus, this work describes how temporal analysis techniques can be applied to improve the safety management of construction data. Various time series (TS) methods were adopted for identifying the leading indicators or predictors of construction accidents. The data set used herein was obtained from a large construction company that is based in Singapore and contains safety inspection scores, accident cases, and project-related data collected from 2008 to 2015. Five projects with complete and sufficient data for temporal analysis were selected from the data set. The filtered data set contained 23 potential leading indicators (predictors or input variables) of accidents (output or dependent variable). TS analyses were used to identify suitable accident predictors for each of the five projects. Subsequently, the selected input variables were used to develop three different TS models for predicting accident occurrences, and the vector error correction model was found to be the best model. It had the lowest root mean squared error value for three of the five projects analyzed. This study provides insights into how construction companies can utilize TS data analysis to identify projects with high risk of accidents.