Emerging information, communication and technology systems applied to construction vehicle safety

Management Information Systems (MIS) have been widely used in the construction industry for a number of Information Communication and Technology (ICT) systems ranging from payroll to machine inventory applications. However, in recent years MIS has also been utilised by occupational health and safety advisors, specifically, when dealing with plant and equipment operations. Anecdotal evidence would suggest that the high (and largely unchanged) incidence of plant and equipment accident rates coupled with the growing number of new legislative requirements have been instrumental factors driving this change agenda. This uncontrolled change of MIS utilisation has lead to an explosion of bespoke system applications being developed and often these focus on single applications such as machine maintenance, vehicle tracking or continuous mechanical health monitoring. At present there is no single holistic package that covers the whole scope of machine related activities that could benefit health and safety. This paper presents some of the first research to produce a critical appraisal of existing MIS systems applied to the safe management of mobile plant and equipment on construction sites. Leading on from this, the work then proposes a new system that encapsulates the desirable attributes of various systems into one integral hybrid system.