The collaborative research effort will focus on understanding how safety training interventions can be designed to maximize work-related safety performance in the context of the construction industry. The effort is expected to involve the formulation of research questions, the development of research methods, the collection of data, and the analysis of relevant data. The results of the effort are expected to improve our understanding of the science of safety training. Such an understanding will inform efforts to design and deliver highly-effective safety training interventions that target the construction workforce.

Construction projects have increased in complexity with the advent of new technologies and alternative project delivery methods. Larger projects, typically considered to be relatively more complex than smaller ones, have different risk profiles that need to be considered. As a result, these projects are more prone to schedule delays and larger budgets than smaller projects (Luo, He, Jaselskis, & Xi, 2017; Flyvbjerg, 2014). A study conducted by the Construction Industry Institute (CII) shows that only 5.4% of the 975 construction projects studied met their planned performance objectives in terms of cost and schedule (CII, 2012). To mitigate the effects of project complexities and to address environmental, social, and corporate governance impacts on project front-end planning, strategies are needed to enable project managers to leverage CII published industry standards-based project execution plans for each project phase to ensure that the project progresses as planned. By making use of such plans, project managers will be able to gain a better understanding of project performance, thereby leading to more favorable project outcomes.

The effort will focus on developing an educational case study that focuses on construction safety challenges. The case study will be designed for use by university professors in construction programs and contractors for professional training and educational purposes.

Utility workers sustain a disproportionate number of injuries. The proposed research will examine incident reports to unveil precursors, causes, and outcomes of injuries sustained by these workers. The results will offer insights into the prevention of incidents and management of safety among these workers.

Driver license examiners play a crucial role in accident prevention ������������������ by serving as the first line of defense against unsafe drivers and driving practices. More specifically, these examiners ensure that driving licenses are only issued to individuals that can demonstrate basic competency in safely operating motor vehicles. While the examiners are fundamental to preserving the safety on our highways, they are themselves exposed to high levels of safety risk as they test new drivers ������������������ with limited proficiency and experience in driving. In fact, estimates suggest that hundreds of accidents and injuries ������������������ and many more near-misses ������������������ are reported every year during driving tests in the United States. Such incidents often result in injuries, property damages, personal distress, and worker compensation claims that exceed hundreds and thousands of dollars every year.

Construction workplaces continue to report an unacceptable number of safety incidents. The purpose of the proposed research is to design and evaluate novel interventions to improve hazard recognition and safety performance. The results of the study can lead to substantial reductions in construction injuries and the associated worker compensation claims.

Adopting proactive safety measures to protect the workforce is an extremely important issue in transportation and infrastructure development projects. Workers involved in the construction and maintenance of highways and bridges are highly susceptible to being injured on-the-job. For example, maintenance work on bridges require that workers spend extensive time at height, exposing them to fall-related hazards. In fact, falls to a lower level has been identified as a leading cause of fatal injuries and the second highest cause of nonfatal injuries in construction. While North Carolina (NC) bridges have been designed to provide adequate protection for vehicular traffic, many bridges do not provide sufficient protection to workers involved in construction and maintenance works. Specifically, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) require that the height of guardrails that protect workers from falls be 42 inches plus or minus 3 inches. Unfortunately many bridge rails in NC do not meet these criteria, and therefore do not provide adequate protection against falls. To address this issue, NC DOT adopts Fall Protection Supplementary Devices (FPSD) that can temporarily be installed to provide sufficient protection while work is performed. However, all products currently available in the market are not compatible with all bridge rails. Moreover, there is currently no protocol available to NCDOT employees to select the appropriate FPSDs for specific bridge application. This has, in the past, resulted in work inefficacy, loss of productivity, and higher operating costs. The goal of this research effort is to develop a decision support system for the selection of appropriate FPSDs for bridge construction and maintenance works. Specifically, the study will (1) evaluate available FPSD solutions available in the market, (2) extract bridge design features across NC State, (3) test compatibility between FPSDs and bridge design, (4) and develop a decision making mechanism for the selection of effective and cost-efficient fall prevention solutions. It is expected that this research can significantly reduce inefficiencies in work processes and improve worker safety.

Proper hazard recognition is fundamental to the success of any safety management program. When construction hazards remain unrecognized, they are more likely to remain unmanaged, which can lead to catastrophic incidents in construction workplaces. The objective of the proposed research is to develop hazard recognition skill among construction engineers and managers to tackle the safety challenges experienced in dynamic and dangerous construction workplaces. The objectives are expected to be accomplished using personalized interventions that has received little attention in past research.

To enhance construction safety performance, this research will deploy eye-tracking technology to capture explicit and tacit hazard recognition knowledge from construction experts. Following this, the captured knowledge will be transferred to novice construction professional. It is expected that this research effort will improve our understanding of the hazard recognition process in construction, and will help researchers develop improved hazard recognition procedures for dynamic environments.