Harnessing BIM with risk assessment for generating automated safety schedule and developing application for safety training

Abstract

The construction industry accounts for 24.20% of all accidents in India, resulting in almost 75 accidents daily. Every construction job involves certain risk levels, often resulting in losses such as fatalities, compensation costs, man-hour loss, work delays, and ergonomic disorders in workers. Poor site safety management and hesitation towards adopting new methods and technologies often result in inefficient workflow, accidents, and inferior productivity. All these factors pile up, causing a surge in indirect costs, almost four times direct costs. The Indian construction industry employs 51 million workers but has only 4% formally trained workforce. Safety planning is currently considered a 'secondary' task due to insufficient safety budget, lack of well-defined training modules and modern tools, unawareness about underlying hazards, etc. The current study is an attempt to identify and assess underlying activity-based hazards using the Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) approach by harnessing the potential of digital tools such as Building Information Modelling (BIM) and Visual Scripting in Dynamo v.2.10 to facilitate automation in generating 'Safety Schedule' in coordination with the project schedule. This study presents a novel idea of proactive safety planning, enabling workers and managers to foresee possible hazards associated with ongoing activity. Further, a worker training tracker prototype is developed in Microsoft Visual Studio using C# to store and track workers' safety training information. Managers can use this tracker to review workers' competence and ensure that they would have received appropriate role-based safety training. The applicability and effectiveness of the proposed method are demonstrated through a case study project.