A decision method for construction safety risk management based on ontology and improved CBR: Example of a subway project

Early decision-making and the prevention of construction safety risks are very important for the safety, quality, and cost of construction projects. In the field of construction safety risk management, in the face of a loose, chaotic, and huge information environments, how to design an efficient construction safety risk management decision support method has long been the focus of academic research. An effective approach to safety management is to structuralize safety risk knowledge, then identify and reuse it, and establish a scientific and systematic construction safety risk management decision system. Based on ontology and improved case-based reasoning (CBR) methods, this paper proposes a decision-making approach for construction safety risk management in which the reasoning process is improved by integrating a similarity algorithm and correlation algorithm. Compared to the traditional CBR approach in which only the similarity of information is considered, this method can avoid missing important correlated information by making inferences from multiple sources of information. Finally, the method is applied to the safety risks of subway construction for verification to show that the method is effective and easy to implement.