Converging Technologies for Safety Planning and Inspection Information System of Portable Firefighting Equipment

Abstract

Many construction workers are getting injured or killed in fires and explosion accidents each year. The workers are prone to severe fatal accidents due to unavailability of permanent firefighting system in many construction sites, thus they typically rely on portable firefighting equipment (PFE) to minimize fire damage. Many occupational health and safety agencies have developed safety regulations for PFE installation and monitoring in construction. However, in the traditional construction fire safety management process, the installation spots for PFE's are visually identified in a 2D floor plan and then top-down supervisory approach is used to inspect the active availability of the PFE's. Such manually operated conventional methods of PFE installation and monitoring are expensive, prone to manipulation, and do not provide sufficient motivation for voluntarily following fire safety policies. Therefore, this research study develops a fire safety rule-based PFE installation approach and proposes an alternative method for shifting the top-down inspection approach to the bottom-up voluntarily approach for convenient, transparent, and automated safety inspection information delivery. To validate the bottom-up approach concept, a visual language algorithm is initially developed for PFE installation planning system (PFE-IPS) in BIM, followed by an optical character recognition (OCR) and blockchain -based android application for safety inspection information system (SIIS). This article also presents two case studies to evaluate the feasibility and practicality of the developed systems. The proposed approach out-turn reduces the safety manager's manual efforts and burdens of government safety auditors while enhancing efficiency and reliability.