Abstract
Effective safety management is a key aspect of managing construction projects. Current safety management practices are heavily document-oriented that rely on historical data to identify potential hazards at a construction job site. Such document-bound safety practices are prone to interpretative and communication errors in multilingual construction environments, such as in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Applications of Building Information Models (BIM) and Virtual Reality (VR) are claimed to improve hazards identification and communication in comparison to 2-D static drawings by simulating job-site conditions and safety implications and thus can interactively educate the job-site crew to enhance their understanding of the on-site conditions and safety requirements. This paper presents findings of a case study conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of 4-Dimensional (4-D) BIM and VR in simulating job-site safety instructions for a multilingual construction crew at a project in the UAE. 4-D BIM-enabled VR simulations, in lieu of the Abu Dhabi Occupational Safety and Health Center (OSHAD) code of practice, were developed and tested through risk assessment and safety training exercises for the job-site crew. The results showed a significant improvement in the job-site crew’s ability to recognize a hazard, understand safety protocols, and incorporate proactive risk response in mitigating the hazards. This study concludes that 4-D BIM-enabled VR visualization can improve information flow and knowledge exchange in a multilingual environment where jobsite crew do not speak a common language and cannot understand written safety instructions, manuals, and documents in any common language due to linguistic diversity. The findings of this study are useful in communicating safety instructions, and safety training, in the UAE, as well as in international projects.
Highlights
The construction sector in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is ranked among the leading industries in the world
This paper presents the findings of a case study conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of 4-Dimensional (4-D) Building Information Models (BIM) and virtual reality (VR) in simulating job-site safety instructions for a multilingual construction crew at a project in the UAE. 4-D BIM-enabled VR simulations, in lieu of the Abu Dhabi Occupational Safety and Health Center (OSHAD) code of practice, were developed and tested through risk assessment and safety training exercises for the job-site crew
A high score depicts that VR-based tools are more helpful in safety training than traditional methods of safety learning
Summary
The construction sector in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is ranked among the leading industries in the world. Considering the complexity and time constraints of construction projects, all construction job sites require safety orientation and training, which places additional responsibility on workers to ensure requisite capacity building within a short time and simultaneously complying with the rules and regulations during the designing, planning, and execution of tasks [5,6]. This situation worsens in multilingual construction environments, such as those in the UAE, where the construction workforce is an amalgam of personnel with varying ethnical backgrounds [2], nationalities, educational qualifications, and religious beliefs [7]. Typical construction safety management consists of four steps: (1) safety induction, (2) safety site planning, (3) safety monitoring, and (4) safety training
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