Gis as a Planning Tool for Health and Safety Management in Linear Construction Projects

This paper describes an on-going study that aims to develop a web-based spatial decision support system model for proactive health and safety management in linear construction projects. Currently, health and safety management is usually performed reactively instead of proactive management since hazard identification and risk assessment is mostly performed on paper based documents that are not effectively used at site. This leads to accidents and fatalities at construction sites. The proposed system automatically identifies the spatial risks according to the topographic and layout map of the site, project specification and health and safety regulations by means of spatial queries. It enables the workers and management personnel to access the possible hazards and thematic risk map of any portion of the construction site for linear projects. Finally, the described approach provides the proposed mitigation measures for the identified hazards. The developed system is expected to raise awareness in H&S among workers and engineers, and increase participation of workers to health and safety management.