Automated Spatiotemporal Identification and Dissemination of Work Crews' Exposure to Struck-By Hazards

The construction industry is among the most hazardous industries, and its continuously changing, and complex environment results in a labour-intensive task to plan and prevent hazards. The current manual safety planning procedures cannot be performed with a temporal resolution that represents all stages of the environment. This leads to unplanned durations and an increased responsibility for the individual workers to analyse and act accordingly to a situation. With this work, we propose an automated approach to identify and measure the amount struck-by falling objects hazard exposure to the construction tasks and their assigned work crews. The automated identification, dissemination, and digitization of hazard identification allows safety professionals to perform safety analysis every time the spatial situation of the construction site changes and introduces temporary safety equipment or suggests changes in the sequence of tasks to lower the exposure of workers to hazards. Additionally, it allows for a comparison between schedules, which is highly relevant with respect to digital twins, where alternative plans are generated based on historical knowledge about construction projects. The approach is described through a graphical and algorithmic approach, which is then validated in two case studies. The case studies reveal the potential and, at the same time, requirements for the scheduling of construction projects if automated approaches should realise their full potential.