LM-DSB: A Lightweight Multi-agent System for Automated Daily Safety Bulletin Generation in Construction
Construction safety management still struggles to produce daily safety bulletins (DSBs), structured daily communications that identify site-specific hazards, convey safety protocols, and set preventive measures for workers. Manual DSB creation takes 2-3 hours daily and yields inconsistent quality, with 25% of crews never conducting pretask planning (Olson et al., 2016), diverting safety personnel from field supervision. This study proposes the Lightweight Multi-Agent DSB System (LM-DSB), which integrates retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with a locally deployable Large Language Model (LLM) to automate DSB generation on consumer-grade personal computers. LM-DSB coordinates specialized planner, researcher, and writer agents in a hierarchical architecture, enhanced by domain-specific fine-tuning on construction safety documentation and RAG grounding in 37 health, safety, and environment (HSE) documents. A two-phase validation assessed feasibility. Phase 1 comparative evaluation showed the multi-agent RAG system (Llama 3-8B) outperformed all alternative configurations, with strong lexical alignment and coherence (TF-IDF: 0.70, BLEU: 0.39, ROUGE-1: 0.66) and near-complete document generation (length ratio: 1.01 vs. 0.39 for single-agent RAG). Phase 2 expert evaluation (N=40) confirmed practical acceptability (mean scores 3.50-4.20 on a 5-point scale), particularly in regulatory compliance (4.20) and factual accuracy (4.10). The findings show that architectural design enables lightweight models to handle safety-critical documentation on consumer-grade hardware, advancing technology democratization in construction safety management. Limitations include knowledge base scope, language constraints, and lack of field deployment validation; future work should address multimodal integration and workflow adoption.