ABSTRACT

Construction Industry is the 2nd largest industry in India next to

agriculture. It makes a significant contribution to the national economy
and provides employment to large number of people. The use of various
new technologies and deployment of project management strategies has
made it possible to undertake projects of mega scale. It is the only
unorganized sector where work is carried out on daily basis and majority
of work force involved is mobile, illiterate, orphans and deserted by the
society and very often the projects were carried out in extreme
environmental conditions prone to accidents and health when compared
to other areas.

Inspite of the progress made in reducing accidents the management

should focus to increase the efforts to further minimize occupational
injuries and deaths which may affect the availability of manpower and
also some financial losses to both workers and management which
indirectly incurs heavy expenses resulting out of accidents, decreased
production, damage to the machinery, poor quality of products, excessive
waste of working hours, project duration and overall project cost. In order
to reduce and eliminate construction accidents the various researches
have explored techniques implemented by different construction agencies
to reduce the number of accidents and its consequences.

Over the last few years an alternative reasoning and problem

solving method known as Case Based Reasoning (CBR) has attracted
more and more attention which solves new problems by adopting
previously successful solution to similar problems in construction projects.
An attempt has been made to identify the major causes of accidents that
affect safety in construction industry and also to suggest a methodology
to prevent and reduce the accidents using CBR methodology.

1
 Previous accidents that have took place in the recent years were
studied by preserving the case studies with the causes of accidents
leading to severe major and minor accidents with their impact on the
construction project.

Using some past cases, the CBR methodology has been applied to
prevent accidents in a project under construction. Required safety
measures and precautions have been suggested that would prevent the
accidents in a project. The study under CBR provides new direction for
applying it to other construction management problems. The major
strength of the case based approach system is that the guidance in the
form of relevant previous cases is provided in almost every instance.