Human-in-the-Loop Cyber-Physical Systems for Construction Safety

Construction industry is bracing for a paradigm shift resulting from the tightly integrated cyber and physical worlds. Advances in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) in Construction have led to a variety of novel applications from additive manufacturing in construction to autonomous heavy equipment operations. Despite the high level of autonomy in some CPS applications in construction, human’s role is indispensable. Human can influence the system from different perspectives that can enhance or impair it. Capturing and defining the role of human in the loop of cyber-physical systems is becoming increasingly essential, particularly for the applications in construction safety.This chapter offers a synthesis of multiple frameworks in the literature for human-in-the-loop cyber-physical systems (HiLCPS) and proposes a tailored framework for the application in construction safety. The proposed framework consists of four stages (i.e., data gathering, state inference, actuation, and feedback) with distinguished human roles for each stage. Furthermore, examples of human factors leading to unsafe behaviors in construction are also discussed for the use in the proposed framework.