An Agent-Based Cellular Automaton Simulation Model to Study Worker Safety Behavior on Construction Sites: The Impacts of Different Social Influence Rules

The unsafe behavior of the construction workforce is one of the leading causes of accidents in the construction industry. It has been shown that construction laborers perceive the safety behavior of their co-workers and adjust their personal safety attitudes accordingly. Thus, there has been an increasing attention to studying the impacts of the social influence and norms on the safety behavior of construction workers. While existing studies examined the factors that influence the safety behavior of the construction workforce, there is little-to-no research that specifically focused on modeling the role of social influence on the safety behavior of the workers. This paper addresses this knowledge gap by modeling construction sites as a social interaction environment, where the construction workers often adopt the prevailing behavior of their neighbors. More specifically, this paper used agent-based modeling to simulate the safety behavior of the construction workforce based on a two-dimensional, two-state cellular automaton. Four different social influence rules that could impact the safety behavior of construction workers were considered and compared in the developed simulation model. The results showed that modeling the process of conforming to the safety behavior of the neighboring workers could lead to the formation of clusters of construction laborers having identical safety behavior. The paper also identified the most representative social rule that influences the safety behavior of construction workers. This paper adds to the body of knowledge by enabling contractors better understand the safety behavior of their workers and ultimately improve the safety performance in projects.