Occupational Health and Safety in green building construction projects: A holistic Z-numbers-based risk management framework

Abstract

Although quite a few studies have focused on Occupational Health and Safety (OHS)-related issues within the context of sustainable building construction projects, there has been dearth of a study developing a management framework to comprehensively identify, analyze, evaluate, and control the safety risks threatening the involved Green Building Construction Workers (GBCWs). The lack of such consideration leads not only to incurring additional costs for the stakeholders, but also overshadowing the impetus towards the adoption of sustainable developments within the construction industry. As such, using Hong Kong as a case study, a Holistic Z-numbers-based Risk Management Framework (HZRMF) is developed in the current study. The main contributions of the current research to the area of OHS linked to green building construction projects are as follows: (1) identifying all the critical safety risks associated with the relative green-oriented requirements through the proposed integration of Z-numbers with the Delphi technique, (2) calculating the final magnitudes of green-associated safety risks through a novel hybrid Z-numbers-based algorithm by considering the importance weights of risk parameters, (3) evaluating the analyzed safety risks using the proposed five-level strategy, (4) pinpointing the green-oriented requirements that are of high-criticality, and (5) providing a comprehensive list of treatment measures to control the evaluated green-associated safety risks. Ultimately, it was observed that the three most critical safety risks were associated with fall hazards. It is proven that the results and analyses produced in the study using the developed HZRMS could make massive inroads into improving the OHS of the involved GBCWs.