WJSTSD · Vol 16, No 1 · 2019

Big Data Platform for Health and Safety Accident Prediction

Anuoluwapo Ajayi
Faculty of Business and Law
University of the West of England
Oladimeji Olawale
Faculty of Business and Law
University of the West of England
Bristol Enterprise and Innovation Centre, Bristol Business School
University of the West of England
Juan Manuel Davila Delgado
Big Data Analytics Lab
University of the West of England Bristol
Muhammad Bilal
Big Data Analytics Lab
University of the West of England Bristol
Olugbenga Akinade
Big Data Analytics Lab
University of the West of England Bristol
Lukman Akanbi
Big Data Analytics Lab
University of the West of England Bristol
Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the use of the big data technologies for health and safety risks analytics in the power infrastructure domain with large data sets of health and safety risks, which are usually sparse and noisy.

Design/Methodology/Approach

The study focuses on using the big data frameworks for designing a robust architecture for handling and analysing (exploratory and predictive analytics) accidents in power infrastructure. The designed architecture is based on a well coherent health risk analytics lifecycle. A prototype of the architecture interfaced various technology artefacts was implemented in the Java language to predict the likelihoods of health hazards occurrence. A preliminary evaluation of the proposed architecture was carried out with a subset of an objective data, obtained from a leading UK power infrastructure company offering a broad range of power infrastructure services.

Findings

The proposed architecture was able to identify relevant variables and improve preliminary prediction accuracies and explanatory capacities. It has also enabled conclusions to be drawn regarding the causes of health risks. The results represent a significant improvement in terms of managing information on construction accidents, particularly in power infrastructure domain.

Original/Value of the Paper

This study carries out a comprehensive literature review to advance the health and safety risk management in construction. It also highlights the inability of the conventional technologies in handling unstructured and incomplete data set for real-time analytics processing. The study proposes a technique in big data technology for finding complex patterns and establishing the statistical cohesion of hidden patterns for optimal future decision making.

Keywords
Big data analyticsHealth and safetyMachine learningHealth hazards analytics
Citation

Ajayi, A., Oyedele, L., Davila Delgado, J.M., Akanbi, L., Bilal, M., Akinade, O. and Olawale, O. (2019), "Big data platform for health and safety accident prediction", World Journal of Science, Technology and Sustainable Development, Vol. 16 No. 1, pp. 2-21. https://doi.org/10.1108/WJSTSD-05-2018-0042