Design-for-Safety knowledge library for BIM-integrated safety risk reviews

Safety is a major concern in the construction industry. Recent studies have shown that many construction fatalities are related to design and could have been avoided with proper design considerations. Nevertheless, designers have limited knowledge about construction safety and often are unable to identify how their designs may pose a risk during the life cycle of a building facility such as construction, operation and maintenance. Limited effort has been made to help designer to address these safety issues in the design phase. This study presents a structured DfS rule-based knowledge library to provide safety knowledge to designer. Using the DfS knowledge library, an Intelligent BIM-integrated risk review system is proposed to help designers identify risk related to their design element along with required design features. A risk register system is also developed in the BIM platform to follow up for any residual risk. The proposed risk review system has been examined with an illustrative case project. It is found that many of the risks could have been avoided/eliminated with the DfS knowledge library and intelligent risk review system early in the design phase. Thus, it would help to avoid any unexpected delay or costly design change late in the project to mitigate the risk.