Decision support tool for the quantification of fault rates in construction fall accidents

After the occurrence of construction work accidents, expert witness reports received with the aim of quantifying fault rates among parties, play an important role on the court's final decision. However, conflicting fault rates assigned by different expert witness groups for the similar cases are quite common practice, leading to unnecessary and iterative objections raised by the related parties until a consensus among reports has been reached. This unfavourable situation mainly originates due to subjectivity of expert judgments and unavailability of objective information about the causes of accidents. This paper proposes a decision support tool (DST) for the quantification of fault rates in construction fall accidents. The aim of developed DST is to eliminate the contradiction between fault rates assigned by different experts and decrease subjectivity prevailing in expert witness reports. For this purpose, 84 inspection reports prepared by the inspectors of Ministry of Labour and Social Security have been investigated and root causes of construction fall accidents in Turkey have been identified. By using this information, an evaluation form has been designed and submitted to experts. Experts are requested to evaluate the importance of the factors that govern fall accidents and determine fault rates under different scenarios. Based on expert judgments, a rule-based DST has been developed which may enable a decision maker to arrive at an objective conclusion about fault rates of parties involved in construction fall accidents. The proposed DST has been tested with the most frequently occurring cases in Turkey and satisfactory results have been reached.