Filipe Manuel Simões Caldeira
Duration: 2023 – 2025
Cised team members
João Pedro Menoita Henriques
The Civil Construction industry is characterized by involving projects of high complexity, dimension and budgets with the use of numerous human resources.
However, its construction sites are environments conducive to the occurrence of accidents, some of them fatal or with serious injuries, as a result of the number of workers, goods and equipment that circulate and operate in them. Falls are one of the most recurrent causes associated with accidents. Other consequences of accidents stem from the costs resulting from compensation and new hires, legal liabilities and delays in work, in addition to the impact on the reputation of organizations.
Although there is a national legal framework for managing health and safety at work, with its concepts and standards, the mandatory use of PPE (personal protective equipment), it appears that there is a strong rejection on the part of workers regarding its use. Some of the problems are mitigated by safety management professionals, through the identification of occupational risks on the site, training in the use and handling of PPE, as well as raising awareness of safe behaviour. However, these are disconnected from the reality of operations at the construction site.
To overcome this reality, this project proposes a structure (framework) for auditing safety and health at work in order to reduce the number of accidents at work. This project also intends to define a model that aims to identify the best distribution of sensors across the work sites, avoiding accidents and minimizing their response time. Given the large volume and speed of data to be collected for real-time monitoring processes, an aggregator hub of messages will be proposed that allows efficient exchange between the various stakeholders. Efforts will be delivered to enhance its scalability and reliability by defining a set of performance indicators (KPIs) to guarantee the quality of the services provided by the framework in an uninterrupted manner and with fast response times when faced with large loads.