Studying the impact of UAVs adoption on the safety performance of construction projects using agent-based modeling

Abstract

Despite recent improvements and technological advancements, the construction industry is still hazardous and suffers from high rates of work-related injuries and fatalities due to unsafe site conditions and unsafe worker behavior. As such, standardized inspection procedures to monitor these unsafe conditions and acts and maintain an acceptable safety level were deemed necessary. However, traditional safety inspection practices, entailing a safety officer who navigates the jobsite, are very tedious and time-consuming. Recently, drones or unmanned aerial systems (UASs) gained some attention in the construction field and their adoption on actual construction projects for safety monitoring proved beneficial but is still scarce in the literature. As such, this research work aimed at designing an agent-based modeling tool in order to examine the impact of the adoption of drones on the safety performance of construction sites and compare it against the traditional practice. The safety performance was evaluated using three types of indicators (e.g. incident rate, safety behavior, and hazards reported) and explored for horizontal-type projects versus vertical-type projects. The effect of the dynamicity of the project, the level of site risk, and the initial attitude of workers on the proposed system was also individually studied. Experiments were conducted and results revealed that the safety performance of the project significantly improved when adopting drones as compared to the employment of a safety inspector, but the improvement is less significant under dynamic site conditions. Furthermore, better results were witnessed in the case of horizontal-type projects, high risk projects, and in projects where the initial safety culture is weak. The study contribution lies in shedding light on the potential of drones in enhancing the safety performance of projects, as well as aiding safety managers and practitioners in evaluating their safety management practices and understanding based on the project type and nature whethe