Visibility and proximity based risk map of earthwork site using real-time simulation

Approximately 75% of struck-by fatalities in the construction industry are reported to have been caused by heavy equipment. Researchers have addressed the need for the enhanced safety of earthwork equipment using different approaches. However, none of these approaches enables the equipment to accurately predict the operation of other pieces of equipment for a long-enough time window to find a collision-free path using path replanning. Accordingly, the present paper proposes a novel method to generate the risk map of an earthwork site considering the visibility and proximity based hazards. The proposed method integrates the pose and state data of different pieces of equipment with the prediction about the potential paths of equipment, which comes from near-realtime simulation and script-based path planning, to quantify the risk value associated with different portions of the site. The generated risk map can further be used by individual equipment to ensure that their future path is safe or to perform path replanning if required. The proposed method is implemented and tested in a case study. In the light of the results of a case study, it is found that the proposed method is providing a reliable basis for the safety analysis of earthwork sites.