Early intervention mechanism for preventing electrocution in construction engineering.

The aim of this study is to establish an effective early intervention mechanism for construction engineering to prevent electrocution while improving labor safety and reducing the casualty risk. This study used narrative text analysis and the Haddon Matrix for data collection, and analyzed the causes from the 113 electrocution deaths among in the construction industry, the exhaustive chi-square automatic interaction detector algorithm was employed the segmentation of the correlations. Based on the theory of inventive problem solving, through IDEF0 (ICAM DEFinition) for function modeling was designed the early intervention mechanism. This study revealed the operating features related to electric shock hazards. Early intervention was introduced to reduce the relevant risks and establish safety mechanisms. The first contribution of this study is the determination of hazard correlations between operating features and conductive media, and entry point for the prevention of electrocutions. The second contribution is the suggestion of the establishment of inspection stations for electric tools, thereby ensuring that the portable power tools are safe. The final contribution is the joint application of TRIZ (Teoriya Resheniya Izobreatatelskikh Zadatch) and IDEF0, which establishing the pre-entry testing, strengthening safety mechanisms.

Single-machine scheduling to minimize total completion time and tardiness with two competing agents.

We consider a single-machine two-agent problem where the objective is to minimize a weighted combination of the total completion time and the total tardiness of jobs from the first agent given that no tardy jobs are allowed for the second agent. A branch-and-bound algorithm is developed to derive the optimal sequence and two simulated annealing heuristic algorithms are proposed to search for the near-optimal solutions. Computational experiments are also conducted to evaluate the proposed branch-and-bound and simulated annealing algorithms.