A multi-criteria decision-support approach for fall protection planning

In the last five years more than 600 construction workers have died at work in Germany. This figure shows that safety in construction business is still a problem which has to be faced. In most cases safety-planning is based on checklists and manual description which are not closely related to the actual and specific construction object. The obligatory safety and health coordinator on larger construction sites has not really improved the overall situation. The objective evaluation of safety-planning methods regarding qualitative and quantitative factors could be considerably improved by applying innovative and integrated safety-planning tools. Modern technologies such as Building Information Modeling (BIM) are offering an object-orientated planning through the project lifecycle. However, first the construction methods have to be analyzed and assessed. This paper proposes a hierarchical decision-support system based on criteria assessment. By applying Analytic Hierarchical Process (AHP) the model takes into account five main criteria and also their various subcriteria. The main criteria are safety, costs, installation effort, flexibility and usability. This paper contributes the fundamental analyze of fall protection methods for future investigations. As a result, the developed model assists the site manager to better evaluate safety measures to prevent fall-related accidents.