Determining Strategies for Constructing the Safety Supervision System by Considering Both Internal and External Safety Environments: A Case Study of X Group Corporation, China

Developing a Construction Safety Standard System to Enhance Safety Supervision Efficiency in China: A Theoretical Simulation of the Evolutionary Game Process

Labor safety is one of the most fundamental indicators to improve contractors’ sustainability. Safety supervision plays a crucial role in affecting the safety performance of infrastructure projects. However, studies of standards development to enhance safety supervision efficiency are far from complete. Safety standards define safe behaviors for construction workers and hazard control processes in the workplace, and they are usually considered as an important part of safety control. In addition, the systematic reform of construction safety standards in China provides an innovative perspective to enhance safety supervision efficiency by linking standards to supervision. For this purpose, this paper proposes the concept and framework of the “Construction Safety Standard System (CSSS)” through expert interviews. CSSS hierarchically classifies safety standards and integrates similar standards. Its implementation will significantly influence the behavioral decisions of safety supervision stakeholders. Evolutionary game (EG) theory is applied to demonstrate the decision-making procedure in CSSS establishment and application. Furthermore, system dynamics (SD) is utilized to model and analyze equilibrium states under different supervision strategies. Meanwhile, case studies are implemented to assess the CSSS’s effectiveness in reality. The numerical results indicate that through CSSS implementation, the strategy choice fluctuation of supervisors and contractors is suppressed and a more desirable stable equilibrium is reached. The government tends to supervise and contractors tend to obey safety standards consciously. The findings reveal that CSSS can enhance safety supervision efficiency and have meaningful implications for theoretical study on safety supervision and construction safety management practice.

Developing a Dynamic Supervision Mechanism to Improve Construction Safety Investment Supervision Efficiency in China: Theoretical Simulation of Evolutionary Game Process

The construction industry suffers from poor safety performance caused by the joint effect of insufficient safety investment by contractors and inefficient safety supervision by the government because of the information gap between the two sides. The present study aims to put forward a new pathway to improve safety investment supervision efficiency and analyze the decision-making interactions of stakeholders under this new pathway. For this purpose, this study establishes a safety investment information system to eliminate the information gap between the government and contractors for construction projects in China and further develops a dynamic safety investment supervision mechanism based on this. Evolutionary game theory is used to describe the decision-making interactions among stakeholders under the current static supervision mechanism and the dynamic supervision mechanism proposed in this research. Moreover, system dynamics is adopted to simulate the evolutionary game process and analyze the supervision effect and equilibrium state of different supervision mechanisms. The results reveal that the proposed safety investment information system could facilitate the transition of the supervision mode from static to dynamic; the evolutionarily stable strategy does not exist in the current static penalty scenario; and the dynamic supervision mechanism that correlates penalties with contractors' unlawful behavior probability can restrain the fluctuation of the evolutionary game model effectively and the players' strategy choices gradually stabilize in the equilibrium state. The results validate the effectiveness of the proposed dynamic supervision mechanism in improving supervision efficiency. This study not only contributes to the literature on safety supervision policy-making but also helps to improve supervision efficiency in practice.