The construction industry serves as a vital force driving China's economic development. However, due to the characteristics of construction projects such as changeable working environments, high personnel mobility, and frequent cross-operations, the accident rate remains generally high, posing a serious threat to the lives and property of personnel at construction sites and surrounding areas.Among them, Object strike injury is one of the common "five major injuries" in construction. The risks caused by struck-by accident are sudden and unpredictable. It will cause casualties once such accident occurs. Therefore, in order to improve the severe safety situation, this thesis analyzes the relationship between accident cause and responsible person, which is conducive to strengthening the understanding of the accident mechanism of all participants in the project. Consequently, it will enable them to adopt more targeted accident prevention measures.
This study addresses a critical gap in construction safety management by developing a hybrid analytical framework to dissect the intricate relationships between struck-by accident causations and individual responsibilities. Regarding the research on safety accidents, Initially, the research merely focused on extracting accidents causes. Subsequently, it evolved to analyzing the interrelationships among these accident causes. Currently, the research has further advanced to exploring the connections between accident causes and various other factors. By assigning the implementation of these measures to specific individuals, the execution efficiency of such safety strategies can be significantly enhanced. However, existing studies have failed to clearly assign accidents causes to each specific responsible party. Moreover, most of the selected responsible parties are responsible units, and there is a relative lack of research on specific responsible individuals, such as project managers. This work pioneers a granular approach to link specific causes (e.g., procedural violations, equipment malfunctions) to discrete roles (e.g., project managers, safety officers) within the accident chain. This not only enables various responsible parties to clearly understand their duties but also helps decision-makers formulate more targeted preventive measures. Drawing on a dataset of 125 detailed accident reports from diverse construction projects across China (2018—2023) —spanning small-scale residential developments to large-scale infrastructure initiatives—the study integrates advanced computational and systems-analysis techniques to enhance precision in root-cause identification and responsibility attribution.
The methodology combines text mining and social network analysis with an improved occupational accident tree analysis(OATA) to achieve three breakthroughs. First, extract the "Accident Causes" and "Liability Determination" sections from accident reports to construct a text corpus, using a hybrid algorithm fuses TF-IDF (quantifying term frequency-statistical significance) with TextRank (capturing semantic-contextual relevance) to extract 28 actionable causes from qualitative accident narratives. For example, "inadequate supervision" emerged as the highest-weighted cause (TF-IDF score: 0.0748; TextRank score: 0.0737), validated against industry standards. These causes were then linked to 15 predefined responsibility categories (e.g., project managers, safety officers) through an adapted OATA model, revealing asymmetric causal-responsibility networks. For instance, project managers exhibited the highest aggregated liability (20.71%) due to systemic failures in oversight and corrective actions.
Key findings highlighted management deficiencies as the dominant factor (62% of total liability), with "inadequate supervision" and "delayed hazard rectification" emerging as top contributors. In terms of environmental factors, there is only one category, namely adverse weather, with the impact of wind being the main influence, accounting for 2% of the total liability. The main responsible persons recorded in construction struck-by accident investigation report are: project managers, safety officers, mechanic and other 15 categories. Among them, the chief supervision engineer, safety officer, project leader, general technical workers, special operators and enterprise leaders are in the core position of responsible person network. By analyzing the correlations between accident causes and responsible parties, the specific causes borne by each type of responsible person and their corresponding responsibility rates were obtained. It was found that project managers, general technicians, and safety officers were identified as high-risk roles due to their central roles in decision-makingand compliance enforcement. Smallerprojects showed weaker safety protocols compared to larger ones, with informal subcontracting practices exacerbating risks.
Practically, the study introduces a scalable framework to translate qualitative accident reports into actionable insights. Organizations can prioritize targeted interventions (e.g., mandatory supervisor training), deploy IoT sensors for real-time hazard detection, and align regulatory frameworks with quantitative risk profiles. Methodologically, the research advances safety governance by validating OATA's applicability to construction contexts and demonstrating the synergistic value of blending computational linguistics with systems-based analysis. This work operationalizes the "Safety 3.0" paradigm, shifting from reactive incident response to proactive, responsibility-driven risk mitigation.
为了更好地将事故致因落实到每个责任方,需要深入分析事故致因与责任方之间的关联,提高事故责任方的风险认知水平,国内外学者对此展开了一系列研究。Jabbari等[8]通过专家打分法确定风险因素权重值,再运用职业事故树分析(occupitional accident tree analysis, OATA)技术和职业事故成分分析技术建立事故致因与责任方之间的关联,确定事故责任方的责任承担率。李珏等[9]构建了高坠事故系统的社交网络、任务网络和信息网络,并分析了不同网络之间的关联关系。许璨等[10]利用社会网络分析技术得到大型工程项目中风险因素和利益相关者之间的关系。上述研究的责任方多为责任单位,对于具体责任人,如项目负责人等的研究较少,目前的研究多聚焦于责任单位层面,而对具体责任个体,如关于项目负责人等的研究相对缺乏。这种做法在责任单位内部可能导致责任的模糊感,个别成员可能会认为事故与个人无关,从而忽略个人的责任。此外,如果预防和整改任务沿着企业内部组织结构一层层自上而下地安排,可能会延长整改周期并降低整改效率。所以将责任方从责任单位细化到责任人有利于减少信息传递的步骤,实现从“人找致因”到“致因找人”的转变,针对性地识别并强化个体责任,同时也能制定出更精准的事故预防策略。从研究方法来看,国外的研究依赖于专家打分法,主观性较强;国内的研究只是运用数据挖掘技术构建两者之间的联系,没有进行事故责任人责任承担率的分析。因此,可以将国内外的研究内容与研究方法相结合,进而全面分析事故致因与事故责任人之间的关联。
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