Home // International Journal On Advances in Intelligent Systems, volume 12, numbers 3 and 4, 2019 // View article
Authors:
Hashem Izadi Moud
Xun Zhang
Ian Flood
Alireza Shojaei
Yuanxin Zhang
Craig Capano
Keywords: Risk Assessment; Unmanned Aerial Vehicle; UAV; Monte Carlo Simulation; UAV flight risk
Abstract:
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have been extensively used on construction job sites in the last ten years. UAVs applications span from progress monitoring and site monitoring to structural health inspection and construction safety. While different applications of UAVs on job sites have been extensively researched, the risks and hazards of flying UAVs on construction job sites have never been quantitatively or qualitatively measured. Around the world, the general aviation industry developed sophisticated methods to evaluate risks of UAV flights over general population. However, in construction domain, discussions over risks of UAV flights is nonexistent. This is particularly interesting as the construction industry constantly maintains one of the highest rates of fatalities and injuries, among all other industries, in the world. Currently, UAVs are used in various construction activities regularly without proper risk assessment schemes or safety plans. Neither construction project managers nor construction safety officers have action plans in place for UAV safe use. This paper presents the first known quantitative and qualitative analyses of UAV flight risks in construction job sites. A quantitative model is presented and tested for UAV flight risk assessment, using the Monte Carlo Simulation technique. A case study tested the proposed model on an actual construction job site. The model proposed in this paper can be used by construction safety officers and construction project managers to take safety into account when planning UAV flights over job sites. This paper further argues that using models and methods introduced in this paper can make UAV flights in any environment safer and more reliable.
Pages: 135 to 146
Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2019. Used with permission.
Publication date: December 30, 2019
Published in: journal
ISSN: 1942-2679