Tunnelling and underground construction operations are often characterized by critical safety issues mainly due to poor visibility and blind spots around large vehicles and equipment. This can lead to collisions between vehicles or between vehicles and pedestrians or structural elements, causing accidents and fatalities. To improve the OS&H conditions, it is important to investigate the possible introduction of innovative techniques and technologies to reduce the occurrences and consequences of shared spaces (spaces used by both vehicles and pedestrians). For this reason, research was conducted to investigate the possible use of different technologies of anti-collision systems in tunnelling operations. First, to achieve this goal, an extensive review of the literature was carried out in accordance with the PRISMA statement to select the current techniques and technologies used by general anti-collision systems in civil and mining construction sites. Then, the operating principles, the relative advantages and disadvantages, combinations, and costs were examined for each of these. Eight types of systems and many examples of applications of anti-collision systems in underground environments were identified as a result of the analysis of the literature. Generally, it was noted that the anti-collision techniques available have found limited application in the excavation sites of underground civil works up to the present day, though the the improvement in terms of safety and efficiency would be considerable.

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The use of control banding tools to aid in diminishing risks to nanomaterial exposure play an important part in early-stage risk assessment. With the inclusive nature of these tools, comes a certain amount of uncertainty with their findings, and uncertainty evaluation is an aspect which has scope for improvement in the current tools. The European Chemicals Agency provide three types of uncertainty to be assessed for chemical safety: Model uncertainty which relates to simplifications the model makes, Parameter uncertainty which relates to individual model parameters and Scenario uncertainty which is user dependent. To define possible improvements, the SAbyNA project has made investigations into Parameter uncertainty, and have used the Theory of Scales of Measurement, developed by Stevens. The identification of the measurement scale leads to the understanding of the permissible statistics (e.g., standard deviation) that can be performed with the data. To facilitate the assessment of the scale and the statistics, a check list was produced. Several control banding tools were analysed, and these tools employ ordinal scoring scales, which means that calculating average values and confidence intervals is not permissible. As evaluating the uncertainty in results greatly helps the exposure assessment, because it would describe the “quality” of the data and allow definitive comparisons among each other, it is recommended to improve the quantitative exposure estimation through sampling methods to get more measurements, which are beneficial for the uncertainty evaluation and for which the uncertainty can be evaluated according to the Guide to the expression of uncertainty in measurement.