Examining mental resilience of contractor in urban rail transit construction project under disruptive events

Urban rail transit (URT) construction project contractors are inevitably affected by numerous disruptive events, such as natural disasters, weather-related issues, and construction accidents. Capturing the dynamic mental resilience of contractors in URT construction projects under disruptive events is an important issue. Although existing literature have adopted qualitative methods such as interviews, questionnaires, and proposed conceptual frameworks to investigate the mental resilience of construction project stakeholders, few have identified the key mental resilience attributes of contractors or examined the mechanisms shaping their resilience under disruptive events. To fill the gap, this study introduces a novel agent-based model to investigate the contractors’ mental resilience in URT construction projects subjected to land subsidence and to explore the path that can depict the formation mechanism of mental resilience. This model provides a new computational lens for understanding and improving contractors’ mental resilience in high-risk construction environments. Tested in a real-world case, the model demonstrates its effectiveness in identifying fear emotion as a key driver of mental resilience. Contractors who feel less fear emotion exhibit higher mental resilience. This study bridges the knowledge gap by (1) identifying six key attributes that shape contractors’ mental resilience, (2) revealing a critical path that outlines how these attributes interact to form mental resilience, (3) proposing strategies for improving mental resilience.