SPATIAL ANALYSIS BASED HEALTH AND SAFETY RISK ASSESSMENT 
    
FOR LINEAR CONSTRUCTION PROJECTS 
H. Atay?, G. Toz? 
* ITU, Civil Engineering Faculty, 80626 Maslak Istanbul, Turkey - hasanatay@hotmail.com, tozg@itu.edu.tr 
KEY WORDS: GIS, Health and Safety, Linear Project 
ABSTRACT: 
This paper describes an on-going study that aims to develop a web-based spatial decision support system model for proactive health 
and safety management in linear construction projects. Currently, health and safety management is usually performed reactively 
instead of proactive management since hazard identification and risk assessment is mostly performed on paper based documents that 
are not effectively used at site. This leads to accidents and fatalities at construction sites. The proposed system automatically 
identifies the spatial risks according to the topographic and layout map of the site, project specification and health and safety 
regulations by means of spatial analysis. It enables the workers and management personnel to access the possible hazards and 
thematic risk map of any portion of the construction site for linear projects. 
Finally, the described approach provides the proposed mitigation measures for the identified hazards. The developed system is 
expected to raise awareness in H&S among workers and engineers, and increase participation of workers to health and safety 
management. 
1. INTRODUCTION 
1.1 Construction Industry, Health and Safety (H&S) and 
Geographical Information System (GIS) 
The construction industry is statistically one of the most 
hazardous industries in many countries (Salminen, 1995; SGK, 
2007; BLS, 2009). Besides causing fatalities, construction 
accidents also increase costs, cause delays and damage the 
reputation of the contractors (Everett and Frank, 1996). British 
Health and Safety Executive (HSE) have been reported that cost 
of accidents in construction sector has become 3-6% of total 
project cost (HSE, 2009). 
Construction safety is one of great concern for construction 
industry because of ranked low in the safety standards. Failure 
of managing construction safety may results in injuries, 
financial loss, human conflicts, and penalties. Thus, 
construction industry needs a tool that may help them to 
actively integrate safety and health measure into project 
planning. Therefore there is a need of development of a 
database, which solicits project specific data from the user and 
provides, as output, applicable safety control recommendations 
(Kartam, 1997). 
Complex and vast amount of information available for a 
construction project requires a coordinated system that may 
help in integrating whole information together. With the 
advances in the field of information technologies, construction 
industry has started taking the advantages of some of these 
developments. GIS is a relatively new branch of such 
technologies for managing the spatial and non-spatial data. 
Database is the essential part of any information system 
employed for construction management so the usefulness of 
geographical information system need to be explored (Bansal 
and Pal, 2005). 
GIS is a computer system for capturing, storing, quarrying, 
analysing, and displaying geographic data. GIS is a special class 
of information system, which can be divided into four 
components involving a computer system, GIS software, human 
expert, and the data (Lo and Yeung, 2002). GIS activity can be 
grouped into spatial data input, attribute data management, data 
display, data exploration, data analysis, and GIS modelling 
(Clark, 2001). 
Health and Safety (H&S) management is especially important 
for linear projects (e.g., pipeline or highway projects) due 
spatially dispersed nature of horizontally linear projects. In 
linear projects, the project site is not at a fixed location and 
multiple crews and sub-contractors perform jobs at various 
scattered points along a route which might be hundreds 
kilometres. Thus, it is a challenging task for site engineers and 
superintendents to follow up production closely and to identify 
H&S risks. There is a need for identifying H&S risks 
automatically at the job sites of such projects for proactive H&S 
management and planning. 
1.2 Motivation 
In many construction companies, H&S departments operate on 
a reactive business management model due to a number of 
factors including minimal staff, limited budgets and an 
inadequate corporate safety culture (Mohamed, 2003). Lack of 
resources and support lead to H&S departments that can only 
react to unmanaged hazards/risks rather than being proactive by 
assessing and mitigating risks before a problem or an accident 
occurs. 
To develop a proactive H&S management system, Saurin et al. 
devised a model to integrate safety into three hierarchical levels 
(i.e., long-term, medium-term, and short-term) of production 
planning (Saurin et al, 2004). In another research is a 
framework for a computerized safety and health knowledge