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.
Highlights
T HE construction industry involves numerous unhealthy activities that causes project progress delays, cost overruns, low project productivity, reputation damage, and human fatalities and injuries [1]
This system includes five primary attributes: (1) VPL for translating the fire safety rules from Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) into a Building Information Modeling (BIM) model, (2) multi-agent simulation for virtually evaluating the portable firefighting equipment (PFE) installation and adding more PFEs based on the requirements described in fire safety rules of OSHA, (3) implementing optical character recognition (OCR) to determine the appropriate information generated via PFE inspection and maintenance activities; (4) leveraging a blockchain to ensure the reliability of data generated during inspection and maintenance processes by allocating a specific hash to each transaction; (5) providing accurate assessment information to stakeholders based on images of tag reports captured in the field at an elementary level by workers, technicians, or safety inspectors
This study introduced an automated PFE installation planning system (PFE-IPS) and a smartphone-based application for a bottom-up reporting approach named as safety inspection information system (SIIS) to replace the existing PFE installation and monitoring process
Summary
T HE construction industry involves numerous unhealthy activities that causes project progress delays, cost overruns, low project productivity, reputation damage, and human fatalities and injuries [1]. A compact, advanced, and automated system is required to cope with the fire accidents at construction sites This applied research is initiated by assessing fire accident reports to understand the significance of fire safety management in construction and issues in the conventional system. Intending to ensure the proper location and good working order of the PFE, this applied research study presents a rule-based visual programming approach for location optimization and a smartphone-based android app that employs optical character recognition (OCR) and blockchain technology for inspection data delivery system. This research developed a fire safety rule-based BIM modeling for PFE installation plan, intending to automate the process and ensure appropriate location in the job site.
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