A Resilience Engineering Approach for Sustainable Safety in Green Construction

Abstract

Sustainable construction is a complex endeavour, involving various stakeholders and resulting in situations that are incompletely described or underspecified. Traditional risk assessment methods require a detailed description of the system and safety, focusing on undesirable outcomes, losses, incidents and accidents. Developing this principle, this research describes a new way to deal with risk assessment in the green construction industry using a resilience engineering method based on the functional resonanceanalysis method and analytic hierarchy process methodologies. The functional resonance analysis method defines a systemic framework to model complex systems based on combinations of function variabilities during normal work. Therefore, to quantify the outcomes for risk assessment, this method was used together with the analytic hierarchy process in a case study during the modernisation work on the Maracanã stadium in Rio de Janeiro. The results of this case study demonstrate that the combined utilisation of the functional resonance analysis method and analytic hierarchy process can be utilised to recognise situations where developments could potentially be without control, which enables this to be used as a basis for performing indicators or a monitoring system. Furthermore, this combined technique can be used to assess and quantify the performance variabilities that may lead to occupational or environmental accidents, and provide new recommendations about how work processes should function, minimising production losses, incidents and accidents.

Keywords

• Sustainable construction
• Resilience engineering
• Functional resonance analysis method
• Analytic hierarchy process
• Construction safety
• Occupational safety
• Risk management.