Visibility and Proximity Based Risk Map of Earthwork Site Using Real-Time Simulation

The construction industry accounted for more than 17% of fatal work injuries, i.e., 806 counts of death, in the U.S. in 2012. Approximately 75% of struck-by fatalities in the construction industry are reported to have been caused by heavy equipment. Researchers have addressed the need for the enhanced safety of earthwork equipment in two different streams, namely using advanced planning methods to avoid overlaps between the workspaces of different activities of equipment or using real-time tracking technologies to avoid the collision between equipment in the immediate future. However, none of these solutions enables the equipment to accurately predict the operation of other pieces of equipment for a long-enough time window to find a collision-free path using path re-planning. Accordingly, the present paper proposes a novel method to generate the risk map of earthwork site considering the visibility and proximity based hazards. The proposed method integrates the pose and state data of different piece of equipment with the prediction about the potential paths of equipment, which comes from near-real-time simulation and script-based path planning, to quantify the risk value associated with different portions of the site. The risk is calculated considering how close different pieces of equipment will become to different portions of the space and how long different portions of the space will in the blind spot of equipment in near future. The generated risk map can further be used by individual equipment to ensure that their future path is safe or to perform path re-planning if required. The proposed method is implemented and tested in a case study. In the light of the results of a case study, it is found that the proposed method is providing a reliable basis for the safety analysis of earthwork sites by generating workspaces with different levels of risk that can be used to provide timely alerts to different equipment and crews.