An Integrated AHP-Based Decision Framework for Sustainable Safety Management in Metro Construction Projects

Abstract

Metro building projects are very complex and consume resources and pose numerous risks to workers. That is why the merging of safety and sustainability management is an extremely important objective. The safety measures of traditional type are typically limited to the prevention of accidents, and sustainability activities are addressed separately. This makes decisions made in a piece meal manner during project planning and implementation. In order to overcome this limitation, this study proposes a multi-criteria decision-making model based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), which provides sustainable safety management in the construction of metros. The framework has key elements of sustainability and safety including minimizing environmental impact, ensuring the project is financially viable, ensuring that workers are healthy and safe, ensuring that social disruption is minimized, efficient utilization of resources and that the project is operations-friendly. Expert opinions of metro construction workers, safety engineers, and project managers about the perceived importance of each assessment criterion are obtained using high-stake pairwise comparison survey research designs. Consistency analysis is carried out to ensure that contributions made by experts are reliable. The sustainable safety method ranking model that has been developed makes it feasible to direct the decision-makers to select the most effective interventions to use in the construction sites of metro. The results indicate the most significant ones and determine a list of suggested sustainable safety management choices in a prioritized manner. This provides useful information to the contractors, politicians, and urban infrastructure planners. The proposed framework will increase the safety and sustainability of the metro development through promoting integrated planning approaches that are compatible with sustainable infrastructure development and sustainable building approaches.