Understanding the relationship between safety investment and safety performance of construction projects through agent-based modeling

• This study uses agent-based modeling to study safety performance on a construction site.
• We build a practical framework to investigate how safety investments interacting with other parameters.
• 134 questionnaires were collected as agent parameters used in the model.
• The developed model can identify cost-effective safety investments under different scenarios.

The construction industry in Hong Kong increased its safety investment by 300% in the past two decades; however, its accident rate has plateaued to around 50% for one decade. Against this backdrop, researchers have found inconclusive results on the causal relationship between safety investment and safety performance. Using agent-based modeling, this study takes an unconventional bottom-up approach to study safety performance on a construction site as an outcome of a complex system defined by interactions among a worksite, individual construction workers, and different safety investments. Instead of focusing on finding the absolute relationship between safety investment and safety performance, this study contributes to providing a practical framework to investigate how different safety investments interacting with different parameters such as human and environmental factors could affect safety performance. As a result, we could identify cost-effective safety investments under different construction scenarios for delivering optimal safety performance.