Abstract:  Tower cranes are the most frequently used vertical transportation tools in construction projects. Due to the high operating risks of tower cranes, it remains urgent to improve its safety management level in the industry. In recent years, information and communication technology (ICT) has gradually been applied to the safety management of tower cranes, but the current applications in this field are mostly single-point development, and the level of intelligence is low, which fails to meet the existing safety management requirements of tower cranes. By investigating the relevant literature in the field of tower crane safety management in the past decade, the current research status of tower crane safety management by domestic and foreign scholars was sorted out and summarized, and analyses were made on the object, core technology, attention, and advantages and disadvantages of the existing research. In addition, through the analysis of the existing methods, objectives and framework were proposed for the future tower crane safety management. The potential building information modeling (BIM) and computer vision (CV) in ICT were integrated into the tower crane safety management framework, so as to realize the real-time monitoring and early risk-warning of the tower crane operation process, and to effectively reduce the occurrence of accidents. The proposed framework is expected to promote the intelligentization and informatization of the tower crane safety management, and to provide some inspiration for the healthy development of construction engineering. 

Key words:  tower crane, safety management, building information modeling, computer vision technology, construction accident