Towards the “third wave”: An SCO-enabled occupational health and safety management system for construction

Occupational health and safety (OHS) is of the utmost concern in the construction sector. For decades, researchers and practitioners have endeavoured to enhance construction OHS performance through various measures ranging from “hard” technologies (in this paper, the “first wave” of construction OHS management) such as provision of personal protective equipment, to the more recent “soft”, managerial approaches (the “second wave”) such as fostering a safety culture. Although considerable improvements have been made in construction OHS, the general sentiment is that construction remains one of the most dangerous sectors, warranting more innovative or even revolutionary approaches. This research seeks to develop a smart construction object (SCO)-enabled OHS management system. The central tenet of the system is that artificial intelligence (AI), as the art of creating machines that perform functions that require intelligence when performed by people, represents a direction of the “third wave” in construction OHS management. The system embraces emergent SCOs and harnesses the power of their smart properties of awareness, communicativeness, and autonomy. The system is demonstrated and validated in real-life construction practice and a controlled lab test with a tower crane, the cause of many construction-related injuries and fatalities, as the subject. It is found that the SCO-enabled OHS management system can identify dangerous situations and respond to them autonomously. This research suggests that smarter construction, through incorporation of AI in particular, is a direction of much promise in terms of improving construction OHS.