A systematic review of scholarly works addressing crane safety requirements

The omnipresence of cranes in construction environments and the health and safety concerns associated with their operations have constantly been increasing as a global challenge. Subsequently, endeavors to improve safety of crane operations have gained notable interest among Construction Management scholars in the past two decades. Although identification and analysis of crane safety risk factors and accident causes have been targeted in some studies, a systematic review that reveals the status of current literature on crane safety issues and the extent to which solutions to crane risk factors have been addressed by existing scholarly works is missing. This paper aims to bridge this gap through conducting a systematic review of the available literature since the turn of the century. The systematic analysis of publications proposing crane safety solutions is conducted using the 59 risk factors comprising the Crane Operation Risk Directory (CORD) utilized in this review. In brief, this study attempts to contrast the risk factors that have predominantly been studied in the literature against those that received limited or no attention from scholars. Our results pinpoint eight overlooked areas within the crane safety body of knowledge that are critical to proper implementation of the crane management system prescribed by the AcciMap framework. Our survey of the literature informs the research community and the industry practitioners of the future directions to study the less understood elements of crane safety.