Dongping Fang

• PhD
• Dean at Tsinghua University

Unethical behaviors among contractors are prevalent in engineering management activities within the construction industry, significantly affecting project performance, public safety, and the industry’s reputation. Despite the urgent need to enhance the ethical performance of contractor managers, current research lacks a theoretical framework to sys...

Repair sequence scheduling is a critical step in the recovery planning of interdependent critical infrastructure systems (CIS) in the aftermath of a disaster. It is an important but challenging task that forms the basis for recovery planning and repair resources allocation by CIS managers. Despite the increasing number of studies analyzing repair s...

The number of construction projects at high altitude has continued to increase in recent years. Studies have shown that high-altitude environments pose significant challenges to construction workers and that hypoxia can cause cognitive and physical impairments. However, it remains unclear whether and how high-altitude exposure affects construction...

Construction projects inevitably encounter adversities that threaten their functionality and performance. Understanding the enhancement of project resilience, especially in extreme situations like the COVID-19 pandemic, is crucial. This study introduces a theoretical model to explore how partnering and boundary activities among project stakeholders...

The increasing frequency of extreme weather events poses ever greater challenges to urban resilience and residents’ quality of life. Despite a growing trend advocating for an anthropocentric approach to urban resilience, there remains an inadequate understanding of the evolving hierarchical needs of residents during post-disaster periods, especiall...

Cognitive processes are fundamentals of safety behavior of construction workers. Exposure to hypoxia may impair their cognitive abilities and increase their susceptibility to cognitive failure. However, the high-altitude effect on the cognitive abilities of construction workers remains unclear. This study assessed the cognitive impairment experienc...

The COVID-19 pandemic has undermined the ability of many countries to achieve the Sustainable Developments Goals (SDGs) by 2030. Here, we systematically assess the likely impacts of the pandemic on progress towards each SDG by 2030 at global, regional and national scales. In our analysis, we account for the social and economic shocks triggered by C...

The human factor of critical infrastructure systems (CISs), which refers to the impact of various human characteristics on system operations and management, is a significant contributor to failures in CISs. Advanced techniques for simulating the dynamic influence between the human and technical aspects of CISs are needed for understanding the evolu...

Construction workers frequently experience mental fatigue owing to the high cognitive load of their tasks in a dynamic, complex environment, diminishing their cognitive ability and mobility and necessitating monitoring to ensure safety. Traditional fatigue evaluations rely on the subjective judgment of site managers and workers; this study develope...

The positive influence of owners’ safety management on the safety performance of construction projects has gained significant attention. Considerable research has been performed to examine the relationship of owners’ safety leadership (SL), safety culture (SC), and safety management behavior (SMB). However, there is a lack of understanding of the m...

With the increase of mechanization in the construction industry, more and more construction machines appear on construction sites. This improves construction efficiency but leads to the high risk of human-machine collision. At present, human-machine collision risks are usually monitored and warned manually. It is difficult to identify relevant risk...

To reduce earthquake-induced casualties, it is essential to analyze the capability and demand of post-earthquake medical rescue in a city. This study proposes a joint method for such analysis. First, a casualty analysis solution using a population heat map was created to determine the demand for post-earthquake medical rescue. Subsequently, a route...

Modern critical infrastructure systems (CISs) are becoming increasingly dependent on each other for proper operation, which also exposes the systems to higher risks of cascading failures. Prior research has attempted to quantify the interdependent effect (IE) of CISs under random or intentional disruptions. However, those efforts are limited with r...

Management of urban seismic resilience relies on effective assessment approaches. However, developing an approach for the quantitative assessment at the urban scale remains to be a challenging task due to the complexity and heterogeneity of urban systems. Accordingly, Part I proposed a Restored Quality of Life-based approach to bridge this gap. As...

With rapid urbanization, today's cities are increasingly vulnerable to unpredictable and catastrophic environmental hazards such as earthquakes. A quantitative approach for seismic resilience assessment at the urban scale is still a challenging task because of the extreme complexity of urban systems. This study proposes a Restored Quality of Life-b...

Knowledge of local earthquake hazards is essential to encourage earthquake preparedness behaviour. However, within communities lacking hazard information and social norms that encourage earthquake preparedness, convincing individuals to embark on earthquake preparedness is a great challenge. This study aims to examine the role of hazard information...

Infrastructure systems play a crucial role in ensuring the safety of cities and the well‐being of residents after earthquakes. Meanwhile, infrastructure systems are vulnerable to earthquakes and may fail to provide necessary services, highlighting the significant need to improve seismic emergency performance. Nevertheless, the seismic emergency per...

Accidents occur frequently and casualties are serious in the construction industry. The rapid development of information technology such as data acquisition and construction assistance provide new solutions to improve construction safety. Using the bibliometric method, this paper analyzes the research status and hot spots of construction safety fro...

While previous studies have extensively explored the neural mechanisms of perceptual decision-making, most of them used paradigms with limited real-life consequences and largely neglected participants' individual differences. In this study, to resemble a perceptual decision-making scenario with real-life consequences, construction workers were recr...

The pre-hospital emergency services (PES) play a vital role in improving the survival and recovery rates of the injured after an earthquake, which, however, may also be interrupted during the earthquake. Appropriate quantitative approaches for assessing pre-hospital seismic resilience (PSR) are lacking,making it challenging to take resilience enhan...

China's engineering practice is faced with acute and complex ethical issues in the new era. The ethical improvement of engineering management lags behind the rapid growth of engineering construction, which hinders the effective solution of ethical issues and the high-quality development of Chinese engineering. Using methods of theoretical analysis,...

Safety culture can change human behavior pattern from consciousness level, and realize accident prevention by reducing or even eliminating unsafe behaviors. However, it is impossible to systematically and directly develop safety culture enhancement measures with reference to the existing dimensions and items of safety culture measurement methods. T...

The importance of safety leadership in the construction industry has been widely recognized. However, previous studies have largely focused on the internal stakeholders in construction projects with no systematic discussion of the importance of safety leadership among the building industry regulators who are important external stakeholders. This st...

Business interruption ratio (BIR), the ratio of reduced production or service level of a business to the predisaster level when it reopens in the aftermath of a disaster event, is a significant indicator of the overall disaster-induced economic impacts. This study proposes a new analytical framework for modeling the BIR of businesses in different e...

The importance of the owner's safety management behavior has been widely recognized. The previous studies largely focused on specific safety management practices and lacked a systematic and targeted improvement of owner's safety management behavior. This study aimed to evaluate the owner’s unsafe management behavior based on the construction safety...

Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is a long-term task, which puts forward high requirements on the sustainability of related policies and actions. Using the text analysis method, we analyze the China National Sustainable Communities (CNSCs) policy implemented over 30 years and its effects on achieving SDGs. We find that the nationa...

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting is gaining importance in the construction industry as an effective tool to communicate social citizenship. Despite the increasing attention on the role of the construction industry in disaster resilience, CSR reporting on resilience issues among construction practitioners has yet to be explored. The p...

Regions impacted by natural disasters such as earthquakes may suffer enormously from interruptions to their economic systems, which usually have long-lasting and profound impacts. Business closure length (BCL), which refers to the post-disaster period during which businesses completely stop their operation, is a critical indicator of the overall im...

Owners’ safety management behaviors in the construction industry are attracting increasing attention. However, previous research mostly focused on specific safety management practices on construction sites but ignored the influence of safety leadership and safety culture on owners’ safety management behaviors. To fill this gap, this study aimed to...

Introduction. Most methods used to develop construction risk responses address the risk-mitigation optimization problem by solving the objective functions. They are passively achieved by satisfying constraint conditions, which are not adequate for efficient construction management. This study aims to provide an active optimization strategy for sele...

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused significant economic and societal impacts worldwide and revealed the importance and urgency of urban resilience enhancement. To learn the lessons from this pandemic, this study undertook a case study in Wuhan City, which was the first city in China where the outbreak was declared, and analyzed the process of its res...

Hospitals play a crucial role in providing emergency medical care to the local community immediately after an earthquake. While the impact of an earthquake may damage critical systems and medical facilities, the effective response of hospitals depends heavily on the capability of the medical personnel to continue delivering medical services to an i...

The systemic heterogeneity between different critical infrastructure systems (CISs) can significantly influence the failure propagation process across the systems. For instance, when power supply systems are affected by an earthquake, physical damages mainly occur at nodes and seldom occur at links, since the cables are flexible enough to withstand...

Since the COVID-19 outbreak, Wuhan has adopted three methods of admitting patients for treatment: designated hospitals, newly built temporary hospitals and Fangcang shelter hospitals. It has been proven that converting large-scale public venues such as stadiums and exhibition centres into Fangcang shelter hospitals, which serve as hospitals for iso...

Resistance to unexpected disasters and rapid post-disaster recovery (i.e., disaster resilience) of cities are extremely necessary owing to the concentrated risk of urbanization. Resilience quantification can adequately reflect the capacity of a city to withstand disasters. Many existing studies have focused on and proposed several frameworks on the...

The city is gradually becoming the most significant carrier of current economic society, in which critical infrastructures (CI), such as transportation, energy, and healthcare, are backbones for the operation of cities. In the meantime, it’s not uncommon in our cities to see traffic congestion, shortage of resources, or environmental pollution, wit...

Hospitals play a crucial role in the mitigation and recovery of earthquake-hit regions, which are expected to be resilient enough so as to provide medical care that is badly needed in the aftermath of earthquakes. Nevertheless, there lack appropriate quantitative assessment approaches of hospital earthquake resilience, which makes it challenging fo...

Extreme weather events (EWEs), due to their high uncertainty, massive scale, irreversibility and destructiveness, may significantly impact cities, including causing notable perturbation to urban human mobility. Recent research has substantially advanced the knowledge on general human mobility patterns in cities, primarily about the spatiotemporal c...

Theoretically, prevention through design (PtD) is the most effective approach for eliminating human error in the field of construction. However, there is a lack of rigorous empirical analysis regarding the focal point of PtD. Hence, this research aims to develop a system dynamics model that depicts a mechanism for identifying the focal point of PtD...

Occupational health and safety (OHS) is of the utmost concern in the construction sector. For decades, researchers and practitioners have endeavoured to enhance construction OHS performance through various measures ranging from “hard” technologies (in this paper, the “first wave” of construction OHS management) such as provision of personal protect...

Pervasive unsafe behaviors of construction workers are the primary cause of accidents on construction job sites. The workers' safety-related behaviors are subject to a variety of factors, such as interactions with coworkers and interventions by management teams. The impacts of these factors have attracted considerable attention in academia but are...

Prior studies have found significant gender effect on people's wayfinding strategies in indoor environments. It is unclear, however, whether the gender effect is significant on people's actual wayfinding performance, especially when the wayfinding task is performed under stress, such as in a building fire evacuation situation. To address this gap,...

In construction projects, the unsafe behaviors are very important reasons of accidents, this research aims at studying the influence of conscientiousness on safety behavior in construction projects. Firstly, according to the existing studies, the hypothesis structure equation modeling (SEM) is established, considering the influence of conscientious...

Retrofitting works has become increasingly important in the construction industry, as it plays an effective role in providing solutions to maintain, upgrade or change the functions to the existing or aged buildings. Very often, safety issues of retrofitting works are underestimated because there may be unreported accidents in small projects and the...

Urban lifeline systems play vital roles in sustaining fundamental functionalities in urban areas. These systems, working collaboratively and synergistically, form a complex system of systems, in which disruptions in one system can rapidly propagate to others, posing a great challenge for the identification and protection of critical infrastructure...

Safety climate has a significant impact on safety motivation. Most prior studies focused on how motivated employees are in a unidimensional safety motivation scale, but they have overlooked why employees are motivated to work safely. The self-determination theory (SDT) is adopted in the present study to investigate how safety climate factors can pr...

Infrastructure systems underpin every aspect of urban life. As they become ever-increasingly interdependent, malfunction of some infrastructure facilities would lead to large scale cascading failure and might have catastrophic impact on urban life. In both academia and industry, continuous efforts have been made to develop appropriate modeling and...

Leadership is proven as a key factor impacting safety while researchers and practitioners are fostering proactive approaches to preventing workplace injuries. Currently, safety leadership and its impact on safety performance is gaining importance within the construction management academia. However, it is still a crucial yet unsettled research issu...

Leadership is proven as a key factor impacting safety while researchers and practitioners are fostering proactive approaches to preventing workplace injuries. Practitioners’ lack of leadership is one of the major causes for the continuous high-level accident frequency within the construction projects. An important yet still unsettled academic issue...

‘Local content’ is increasingly stipulated in international construction business. While it is agreed that ‘local content’ is a part of corporate social responsibility (CSR) agenda, what exactly constitutes a ‘local content’ remains controversial. The primary aim of this study is to (a) map out the status quo of ‘local content’ patterns as portraye...

Establishing a scientific and applicative safety management assessment system is crucial in improving safety performance of organizations. Currently, there are few studies on owners’ safety management assessment systems. Based on the behavioral-based safety theory, this paper explores the links among safety management system, safety management beha...

Natural, technical and man-made disasters pose enormous threats on both cities and their citizens worldwide. The concept of “urban resilience”, which is defined as the ability of an urban system and all its constituent sub-systems to maintain the necessary functions during disturbance, rapidly recover in the aftermath of the disturbance, and adapt...

Behavior-based safety (BBS) methods have been widely reported as an important contributor to the prevention of accidents and improvement of safety performance in construction projects. However, most existing BBS methods fail to look into the impact of the interactions between workers and their supervisors. To overcome this limitation, the impact of...

Leadership is a key factor impacting construction safety, but previous research merely investigated the single-level relationship between safety leadership and safety performance and ignored the leadership interaction between different project stakeholders. To fill this gap, this paper aims to examine the relationships between safety leaderships of...

Globally, falls from height (FFH) are a substantial public health jeopardy and are among the important leading causes of serious and fatal injuries for construction workers. A comprehensive understanding of the causal factors in FFH incidents is urgently required; however, the literature appears to lack a scientific review of FFH. In this study, 29...

This paper focuses on construction workers' unsafe behaviors and develops a cognitive model of construction workers' unsafe behaviors (CM-CWUB). In the construction industry, many accident investigations reveal that workers' unsafe behaviors are the most frequent and direct causes of on-site accidents, and thus need to be addressed urgently. Based...

Purpose – City is an artificial dynamic open giant complex system, whose multifunctional and interdisciplinary characteristics leads to significant complexity. While challenges arising from individual urban functions have been the focus of urban studies, major urban challenges such as traffic congestion and inefficiency of resource usages may origi...

As a major organizational antecedent of worker safety behavior (WSB), management behavior is drawing more and more academic attention because it tends to be the root cause of occupational safety accidents. The current behavior-based safety (BBS) practices in construction do not sufficiently take management behavior into consideration, which leads t...

Owners' role in project safety improvement is drawing increasing attention in the academia. Their greatest leverage is the leadership to influence safety perception, motivation and behavior of other stakeholders. However, previous studies have not paid enough attention to owners' leadership and its impacting mechanisms, nor have they identified eff...

With ever increasing complexities, construction projects are constantly exposed to a variety of risks associated with all stages of project execution from the initial assessment of strategic options through procurement, fabrication, construction, and commissioning. The successful delivery of construction projects and assurance of project objectives...

Critical Infrastructure (CI) plays a vital role in sustaining fundamental functionalities and services in urban systems. As these CI systems are getting more interdependent, disturbances in one CI system often propagate to other systems, imposing significant cascading and devastating risks on cities. This paper introduces a conceptual framework for...

The poor performance of Chinese international contractors in terms of corporate social responsibility can impair their growth and internationalization in overseas markets. This study aims to probe into these contractors’ perception of corporate social responsibility, diagnose perception distortions (if any), and identify approaches to improving thi...

Fatigue is believed to have a negative effect on workers’ safety performance. The current fatigue studies in construction have relied on questionnaire or interview survey, and due to certain limitations of such research method, the changing patterns of errors and the types of errors associated with different levels of fatigue are not well understoo...

In the market of international project construction, corporate social responsibility (CSR) has gradually captured the attention. The conception of CSR varies under different sociocultural settings. The variety leads to differences in ways of how CSR be put into practice and in key performance indicators. In order to have better performance and part...

Despite scientific evidence linking workers' fatigue to occupational safety (due to impaired physical or cognitive function), little is known about this relationship in construction workers. To assess the association between construction workers' reported fatigue and their perceived difficulties with physical and cognitive functions. Using data fro...

To develop a fatigue assessment scale and test its reliability and validity for commercial construction workers. Using a two-phased approach, we first identified items (first phase) for the development of a Fatigue Assessment Scale for Construction Workers (FASCW) through review of existing scales in the scientific literature, key informant intervi...

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) performance is key to project success in the construction industry. Although evaluation tools for CSR have been developed in previous studies, their weighting schemes are easily distorted by inputs from experts with different backgrounds, reducing the reliability of the benchmarking results. This study aims to...

The prevalent disparity and divergence in the identification of safety-climate dimensions in the academia cause general confusion and inconvenience to both construction researchers and practitioners in terms of safety-climate measurement. Existing review studies identified several key dimensions or common features of safety climate, but only in a q...

Safety inspection on construction site is an important method to prevent hazards around the site and unsafe behaviors of the workers. The traditional safety inspection system has several drawbacks. This paper developed an innovated safety inspection system on construction site based on mobile phone application. The new safety inspection system can...

Communication is vital for construction safety, but how it influences unsafe behavior in the work-place remains unclear. This study aims to explore the relationships between communication, cog-nitive failure, and unsafe behaviors in order to clarify those mechanics. We defined communica-tion as management input, worker cognitive failure as process,...

The unsafe behaviors of construction workers are often the immediate causes of construction accidents, but the underlying causation of such behaviors are not well understood. This research regards the management of construction safety as a system, and seeks to use system dynamics to demonstrate how the system influences construction workers in term...

China has experienced almost a decade of large-scale high-speed railway (HSR) construction, in which onsite safety is one of the biggest challenges, especially in the earlier stage. Recent years have seen a significant improvement in HSR onsite construction safety, i.e. an obvious decrease of safety fatalities. A pilot investigation on several HSR...

To gain deep insight into the underlying causation and identify correspondent management strategies in the prevention of construction workers' unsafe behaviors, a conceptual system dynamics model was proposed. This paper mainly focuses on the confidence building of the model through model testing, which basically contains tests of model structure,...

Cultivating a good safety climate is critical to the improvement of safety performance in construction. Previous research has demonstrated that communication is important in strengthening the safety climate. However, few studies have addressed the role of jobsite communication in safety or investigated its relationship with the safety climate. Atte...

To eliminate fatalities and injuries, this work aims to present empirical research based on the examination of safety management practices currently operational in the construction industries of Pakistan, China and Hong Kong with a view to enhancing safety in developing countries. The current safety situation in the construction industries of Pakis...

Safety climate has long been considered a leading indicator for the management of construction safety. Although previous research has concluded that the safety climate of an organization is significantly affected by communication among its individuals, only a limited number of construction studies have explored this relationship as mediated by orga...

The application of Behavior-Based Safety (BBS) approach in construction industry is facing a severe challenge that safety performance may decline when BBS intervention is removed, due to the dynamic and transitory nature of construction sites and workforce. This paper proposes a continuous BBS strategy through integrating the BBS practice into mana...

Fostering a positive safety culture is fundamental and critical for improving safety performance on a construction site. However, the complexity and evolutionary process of safety culture in a construction project team, which is different with other organizations, have not been well addressed and the basic model for construction project safety cult...

Chinese scaffolders not using safety harnesses is commonplace, despite scaffolders being constantly exposed to fall hazards on construction sites and the use of safety harnesses being required by law. The causes of Chinese scaffolders not using safety harnesses are explored through theoretical analyses and empirical tests. In theoretical analyses,...