Safety regulation classification system to support BIM based safety management

Abstract

Construction accidents, injuries, and fatalities have not declined significantly, despite continuous efforts from researchers, safety professionals, and strongly-enforced safety laws. In managing safety, construction personnel are required to access a variety of rules, regulations, guidelines, and documents. However, finding the right contents, and communicating them to right person tends to be tedious and time-consuming, because construction safety information is not systematically structured. This study contributes to addressing this issue by introducing a system framework for integrating BIM dataset with classified regulation document. To accomplish the study objective, a general classification system is developed for safety rules using criteria that can reflect safety rules in BIM environments. To demonstrate, the OSHA's safety and health technical guidelines are selected to classify the legal provisions into safety management steps and tasks aiming to integrate with construction work sequence. From classified safety rules, four different cases are presented to show the practical implementation of classification system. The developed approach is expected to reduce oversights, enable to deliver the relevant safety rules at the right time, and reduce the efforts required for searching through safety contents.