BIM-Based Safety Leading Indicators Measurement Tool for Construction Sites

Abstract

Recognition of safety leading indicators is considered as an important part of safety management in construction projects to prevent hazardous accidents occurrence. In the available literature, the lack of a comprehensive proactive approach for assessing safety, based on active safety leading indicators is tangible. In this study, BIM and knowledge base are integrated to develop a safety management framework, then, this framework is implemented in a case study to assess its performance. Safety leading indicators are extracted from experts’ expertise, documents, and best practice, and then the relationships among safety leading indicators, activities, and their attributes are established; these pieces of knowledge are stored in a safety leading indicator knowledge base. To measure the impacts of these indicators on the project, a framework is developed to integrate the knowledge base and building information modeling (BIM). The developed add-on generates a heat-map to visualize the impacts of the safety leading indicators on a daily basis, and it also produces a textual result sheet. To verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the developed tool a survey from professionals is conducted. This tool provides a way to automatically assess the impacts of the safety leading indicators. Using its results, safety managers and project participants can make important decisions to reduce hazards. The results also indicate that accidents occurring in the construction site dropped by 38% after employing the presented framework.