Examining construction group’s safety attitude resilience under major disruptions: An agent-based modelling approach

The construction industry is undergoing a series of disruptions and industrial changes. In disturbances of major events, construction workers’ safety attitude is at risk of being sabotaged due to factors such as resource reallocations, job insecurity, and mental pressure. The extend of such impact on the safety attitude by the disruptive event is complicated and complex as it depends on individual, group and external factors. This research extended and applied successfully the resilience engineering theory to model the response-recovery process of individual workers’ safety attitude under disruptions. With data collected from questionnaire surveys, an agent-based model was built to describe the dynamic changes of safety attitude under disruptions. The model examined the influence of factors at individual, group and external environmental aspects on both response and recovery stages. The results showed that construction workers’ safety attitude was resilient under external disruptions, and group and external level factors determined the length of recovery process, while individual factors determined if the safety attitude could be eventually fully recovered. When the safety parameters decreased by 28%, the construction group’s average safety attitude would not fully recover, unless compensated by the learning adaptability (LA) increasing by 10%. Furthermore, the results revealed that a high level of group interactions (doubled active-ratio) absorbed the external disruptions and the influence on construction workers with high degrees (doubled centre-value) had greater impact on the overall safety attitude resilience. This research shed lights on developing managerial suggestions to cope external disruptions and maintain the positive and stable safety attitude.