Development of web-based system for safety risk early warning in urban metro construction

At present, underground urban metro construction accidents in China are rising with the rapid growth of urbanization and infrastructure investment. Real-time safety and risk management during urban metro construction has become extremely important but is very difficult, time-consuming and unreliable due to the lack of information and experienced managers. This paper presents the development and application of a web-based system for safety risk early warning in urban metro construction. A hybrid data fusion model based on multisource information (monitoring measurements, calculated predictions, and visual inspections) is employed to imitate human experts to give safety risk assessment and early warnings automatically. In addition, it has significantly improved information collection, sharing and communication by establishing a collaborative platform instead of traditional manual management. The system has been successfully applied to several metro construction projects and has perfected the safety management performance in the cities of Wuhan, Shenyang, Zhengzhou and Kunming in China. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.