Heuristics for managing rework-related safety risks in construction: An ecological rationality approach

Rework during construction often heightens exposure to safety incidents. It frequently stems from decisions made under epistemic uncertainty, when incomplete knowledge of design, site conditions, or task interactions leads to outcomes that require later correction. These situations involve complex human, organizational, and technical interactions whose causal mechanisms are only partially understood and difficult to quantify. As a result, probabilistic and optimization-based risk models can be difficult to operationalize because the information needed to estimate reliable probabilities is often incomplete, inconsistent, and not transferable across project contexts. Using an interpretive case study and retrospective sense-making as analytical lenses, smart heuristics grounded in ecological rationality are developed to support stop–verify–proceed, isolate–stabilize, and escalation decisions when non-conformances pose safety risks in an AU$19.8 billion transport project. Drawing on documented rework events in construction, several Fast-and-Frugal Trees—a smart heuristic—are presented alongside simple, cue-based decision rules as structured decision templates that can support explicit, traceable decision-making and provide a basis for future empirical evaluation. The proposed smart heuristics translate tacit field experience into explicit, communicable decision structures to assist practitioners in structuring their judgment when information is incomplete and time for analysis is limited. By operationalizing bounded rationality through practical heuristic tools, our paper advances understanding of decision-making under uncertainty in construction and demonstrates a systematic approach for structuring quality management information into heuristic decision pathways that can inform future safety risk management.