Early warning for the construction safety risk of bridge projects using a RS-SSA-LSSVM model

Abstract

Bridge engineering is an important component of the transportation system, and early warnings of construction safety risks are crucial for bridge engineering construction safety. To solve the challenges faced by early warnings risk and the low early warning accuracy in bridge construction safety, this study proposed a new early-warning model for bridge construction safety risk. The proposed model integrates a rough set (RS), the sparrow search algorithm (SSA), and the least squares support vector machine (LSSVM). In particular, the initial early warning factors of bridge construction safety risk from five factors (men, machines, methods, materials, and environment) were selected, and the RS was used to reduce the attributes of 20 initial early warning factors to obtain the optimized early warning factor set. This overcame the problem of multiple early warning factors and reduced the complexity of the subsequent prediction model. Then, the LSSVM with the strongest nonlinear modelling ability was selected to build the bridge construction early-warning model and adopted the SSA to optimize the LSSVM parameter combination, improving the early warning accuracy. The Longlingshan Project in Wuhan and the Shihe Bridge Project in Xinyang, China, were then selected as case studies for empirical research. Results demonstrated a significant improvement in the performance of the early-warning model following the removal of redundancy or interference factors via the RS. Compared with the standard LSSVM, Back Propagation Neural Network and other traditional early-warning models, the proposed model exhibited higher computational efficiency and a better early warning performance. The research presented in this article has important theoretical and practical significance for the improvement of the early warning management of bridge construction safety risks.