A Stress-Strain Model for resilience engineering for construction safety and risk management

Abstract

‘Resilience Engineering (RE)’ is a paradigm shift, a discipline, a theory which can be pursuited with a variety of approaches for proactive safety management, which can help the adopted organization better detect where hazards may be released, better cope near the boundary beyond which work is no longer safe, recover if control is lost, and finally to minimize the effects if loss of control is irreversible. The objective of RE is to make ‘Resilience’ as a system property and apply into a management system. A Stress-Strain Model (SS Model) has been developed based on the ‘Four Cornerstones of Resilience’, which can be used to characterize and assess the ‘Resilience’ of the management system by monitoring the relationship of demands or challenge events and the adaptive capacity of the organization to respond. ‘Risk Management System (RMS)’ is one of the key elements for construction safety. However, facing with the constantly changing site conditions, the existing RMS in fact cannot effectively prevent accidents. This is because the existing RMS is based on the assumption of static situations, some unforeseeable potential hazards which cannot be assessed by the risk assessment might happen later during work processes. To dealing with the dynamic nature of construction site, a dynamic system should be developed. By adopting the SS Model as the prototype, with modification based on the construction scenarios, a conceptual model, a risk SS Model has been developed.

Keywords:

• Resilience engineering
• modelling
• construction
• safety
• risk

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work described in this paper was fully supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project No.: 9042033) (CityU 11204114).