Ergonomic Risk Mitigation through Workforce Planning for Construction Projects

Abstract

Construction workers are facing significant ergonomic risks, which negatively affect their health, safety, and productivity, and therefore it is essential to develop effective and applicable risk control measures. In addition to instrument-based risk control methods, which have received the most attention, another easy-to-implement strategy is to consider ergonomic risks in workforce planning to balance physical stress and rest allowance. This study was aimed at mitigating ergonomic risks through workforce planning for construction projects. First, the ergonomic risk can be measured by considering task-specific and personalized features together with processing time. On this basis, a multiobjective mixed-integer programming model with ergonomic considerations was developed. Specifically, ergonomic constraints limit the cumulative ergonomic risk for each worker, and the objective is to minimize overall ergonomic risks across all workers. Small-scale basic examples were used to compare the different strategies for how to take ergonomic risks into account. Then a real-world case was conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and practicability of the proposed method. Compared with the default plan proposed by the onsite superintendents, a 5% decrease in total ergonomic risks and a 41% decrease in max individual cumulative risk was achieved. The method is easy to adopt compared with instrument-based intervention systems, and is flexible to be adjusted according to real-life situations, contributing to sustainable workforce development in the construction sector.