Construction Equipment Safety Assessment and Prioritization Using an Integrated CECSI–MARCOS Framework

Construction equipment safety involves concurrent technical, environmental, human, operational, and organizational conditions. This study proposes a two-stage, observation-based Construction Equipment Complexity and Safety Index (CECSI) integrated with the Measurement of Alternatives and Ranking according to COmpromise Solution (MARCOS) method for equipment category intervention prioritization. The framework was applied to 200 field observations across four residential construction sites and five equipment categories. Eighteen indicators were rated on a five-point observational ordinal scale and organized into five equally weighted dimensions. Four prespecified pairwise interaction terms were combined through a bounded nonnegative increment (λ = 0.20). Six equally weighted, field-derived MARCOS criteria were used without expert elicitation or fuzzy weighting. The revised mean CECSI was 62.19, and 89.0% of the observations fell within the proposed High/Critical screening bands. Tower cranes had the highest equipment category intervention priority; sensitivity analyses identified dependence on screening thresholds and the interpretation of intervention difficulty. The CECSI is an interpretable operational screening index, not an empirically calibrated measure of accident probability. The approach offers a transparent observation-to-prioritization workflow while requiring further measurement and external validation.