Understanding Safety Performance of Prefabricated Construction Based on Complex Network Theory

Abstract

With the rapid expansion of prefabricated construction in China, significant changes in safety performance are still unapparent for numerous prefabricated constructions, and safety accidents are constantly exposed in public. The ignorance of interactions among safety risks impedes efficacious improvement, which instructs the need for a thorough analysis of these interactions based on complex network theory. This paper starts with the identification of 37 safety risks refined through literature review and expert interviews, and 90 interrelationships among them verified by virtue of the questionnaire survey, laying a foundation for the establishment of a prefabricated construction safety risk network (PCSRN). The topological analysis results prove that PCSRN is a scale-free as well as a small-world network, which indicates the high-efficiency propagation and diffusion among safety risks in prefabricated constructions. Moreover, eight critical nodes are identified with four different ranking criteria, and corresponding safety strategies are proposed to address them. The developed method not only provides a novel insight to interpret the safety risks of prefabricated construction but also has the potential to advance safety performance of this sector.