· planning and project execution planning as two
· Incorporation of construction safety and health practices in Building Information Models (BIM) through an automated rule-based safety checking system is the main emphasis of this research.
· The problem statement is very vague in the abstract. It should have been stated clearly instead of declaring construction safety as a national and worldwide issue. But later, it was directly mentioned that the algorithms were used for identifying fall-related hazards, which would have been better if stated earlier as the main issue.
· The identification of 40% of the accidents in construction are due to falls from height was a basis for this research.
· The author discloses that if the design for safety, safety inspection, and monitoring safety fail, there is a surge in the risk of exposing workers to hazards in the construction environment.
· I have inferred that recognizing the potential safety hazards precisely and accurately is one of the critical factors to the safety planning process.
· The two difficulties for safety engineers in analyzing the need for safety measures in preventing accidents/ hazards to arise are: (i) Treating safety planning and project execution planning as two separate entities, (ii) Lack of communication.
· Making contractor responsible for site safety is an unintelligent act. Instead, additional concentration should be on implementing safety practices in design and planning phase.
· The paper proposes that the chain of activities which don’t have acceptable remedial measures and are inherently dangerous are to be spotted at the planning stages and corrected.
· Hazardous workspaces can be identi?ed and potential hazards can be prevented already at the design stage before any ?eld work is started.
· There were many previous works which executed safety practices by the use of two-dimensional drawings (2D) or ?eld observations to determine hazard prevention techniques.
· To facilitate planners in safety suggestions and checking the building model, Information and communication technologies (ICT) for construction safety is aimed at developing a methodology and tool.
· But all of these largely reckon on human input or offer knowledge-based/semi-automated implementation which guided the need for an automated rule-based safety checking system.
· Open Application Programming Interface (API) is used to execute the automated rule checking system in BIM.
· This helps the users to interpret and apply rules that establish conditions of significance in the model and return the reports, which basically consist of “pass” or “fail”.
· The process of rule checking is organized in four major stages such as:
Rule translation stage, Model preparation stage, Rule execution stage, Reporting stage.
· Collecting and analyzing construction data which is followed by taking the existing Safety Rules, guidelines, and best practices and applying them to BIM model is the beginning of the rule-based safety checking system.
· After the developed safety rule checking system has identi?ed the Safety Issues or hazards in the BIM, Corrective Actions, such as design for safety and safety planning, are administered.
· It is said that this model identifies and solves unique problems by applying IF-THEN context.
· The algorithms were explained clearly by taking the examples of slabs and walls.
· A BIM-based structural engineering and modeling software called Tekla Structures was chosen for implementation, where it shows a construction project in progress which includes different types of openings that could be a potential fall hazard.
· Areas need to be broken down into discrete elements to apply fall protection rules successfully.
· In an automated approach, potential safety hazards are instinctively identi?ed and relative prevention methods are applied.
· The potential of the developed safety rule-checker is demonstrated using the case study.
Drawbacks:
· Rule checking is a very intensive operation.
· The system was checked by performing a case study on a standard model. They should have performed it on complex models of buildings and then a comparative study should have been done to check the reliability of the system.
Further Research:
The requirements for safety in BIM can be communicated by developing a new model view as a part of future developments, which is much more accurate and responds according to the working environment of different simple and complex job sites
