Enhancing Motion Trajectory Prediction for Site Safety by Incorporating Attitude toward Risk
The unscripted nature of construction jobs puts equipment and workers in close proximity of one another which can lead to near miss situations or contact collisions. Previous research has primarily focused on location aware methods to improve construction safety from a technological perspective, but has fallen short in investigating the role of individuals in creating or avoiding safety accidents. This paper presents a preemptive safety framework that incorporates not only positional data but more importantly, workers' perception of and attitude toward safety. First, a comprehensive review of previous work related to construction safety, resource tracking, trajectory prediction, and risk behavior is presented. Next, the designed methodology is explained and tested which incorporates worker's risk index (a measure of affinity for or aversion to risky behavior near hazards) with conventional trajectory modeling in order to better predict the worker's future position, and detect potential contact collisions in advance. In particular, we examine the reliability of polynomial regression and hidden Markov model (HMM) in predicting a worker's position given his/her positional data collected by a smartphone's GPS sensor. Next, HMM prediction is further modified by considering the worker's past walk trajectory near hazard zones. Preliminary results demonstrate that the developed motion trajectory prediction can reliably detect unsafe movements and near future collision events. The outcome of this research contributes to improving current practices of site safety monitoring. INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND Workers and equipment continuously interact in construction sites, and can come to close proximity of each another due to random movements and ever changing site layout (Sacks, Rozenfeld, Rosenfeld, 2009) Without proper coordination and site planning, such events can lead to contact collisions and threaten the safety and health of construction crew (Teizer, Ben, Clare, Jimmie, 2010) Therefore, proactive safety monitoring and prevention that could alert workers before a hazardous situation occurs would be of great value. In the past, researchers have developed proximity safety warning and alert systems in construction. For instance, Tizer et al. (2010) used radio frequency (RF) to give an audio visual alert to workers and equipment operators. Dinga et al. (2013) created a safety management tool which integrates fiber Bragg Computing in Civil Engineering 2017 425