Analysis of Safety Performance of Construction Projects in India Using Safety Audit Elements, AHP and Taguchi Loss Function: A Case Study

Construction safety performance is traditionally assessed based on workplace conditions and analyzing accident statistics, there is no provision to consider the safety management systems which affect site safety. One of the systems use to measure safety performance is occupational safety and health audit which identify failures within a system and the information gathered assist to determine the best course of corrective action. Therefore, this study was designed and conducted to develop a method for evaluating the safety performance of five highway project sites in India using the Analytic Hierarchy Process and Taguchi loss functions. In the first stage of the study, the Analytic Hierarchy Process was applied by obtaining the judgments of the expert team to determine the weights of the safety audit elements. In the second stage, the five project sites were analyzed and ranked by determining the total loss score using the Taguchi loss functions. Based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process analysis, the weights of the safety management (0.1949), hazard identification and risk assessment (0.1460), and safety education and training (0.1268) had the highest impact on the safety performance of the five project sites. The results of the Taguchi loss functions of the five project sites showed that the total loss score was the lowest and highest for project site 3 (77.89) and site 5 (81.54), respectively. In the current study, an integrated method was developed for evaluating the safety performance of five highway project sites. The weights of the nine safety audit elements were vital in determining the total loss score by using the Taguchi loss functions for ranking the five projects sites based on safety performance. Therefore, using this method can be an effective step in identifying the project site with better safety performance as a benchmarking unit for the other sites.