Grants and Contributions:

Grant or Award spanning more than one fiscal year. (2017-2018 to 2022-2023)

Construction is predominantly physical in nature, with activities typically executed in uncomfortable environments and at a fast pace. In construction, traditional theories and practices focus mainly on improving Project Management (PM) to assist in project planning and control for productivity improvement. This tends to overlook the physical demands of production tasks during the lifecycle of a project—tasks which can exceed the physiological capability of the worker. This issue results in construction workers being exposed to an approximately 50% higher risk of suffering from work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WRMSDs) than workers in other industries. WRMSDs account for approximately 34% of nonfatal injuries in the construction industry, resulting in a median of 8 days per person per year away from work, compared with 6 days for all nonfatal injury and illness cases in the construction industry. By considering their origin upstream, construction accidents can be reduced by 60% through appropriate design changes. In this respect, the development of physical demand-driven design models and tools can contribute to productivity and safety improvement, with the result of reducing waste of motions (non-value-adding activities) and risk (due to awkward activities performed by the workers).
The long-term objective of the proposed research program is to integrate physical demands into design (e.g., shop drawing) and construction methods (e.g., task procedures) for safety and productivity improvement throughout the lifecycle of a project. The short-term research objectives are: (1) to develop an evaluation framework which is able to quantify how physical demands of tasks interact with the design and operational variables, as well as the influence on productivity and safety (e.g., ergonomic risk levels) when these variables are changed; and (2) to develop a physical demand-driven design system which provides the best-case scenarios of tasks through design changes that minimize waste. The achievement of the goals described in this research proposal will contribute to knowledge advancement in combining safety and method engineering by formulating the correlation between design, physical demands, and construction methods and applying physical demands into design in the early in the planning phase for preventing the ergonomic risks or construction methods in ongoing operations for continuous improvement. The Virtual model as a key in this research is linked with the intelligent and physical demand components for motion data acquisitions and proposed design and/or method simulation so that the potential injury risks of tasks can be dramatically reduced. Through this research, the early application design changes resulting from early ergonomic assessment of construction methods will result in greater benefits and reduced costs for Canada’s construction sector.