Role of BIM in Construction Safety Management: A Step in the Direction of Automatic Hazard Analysis

Abstract

Deplorable safety management practices are damaging reputation of the construction sector. Though legislation has specified rules and regulations for safety improvement, the state of safety violation is still alarming. Its root causes are information unavailability and integration of present data with other project activities. The technology that can help in overcoming these issues is the need of hour. Building Information Modeling (BIM) has the potential to address poor safety performance and therefore has inspired many researchers to focus towards BIM and its application for safety improvement throughout project lifecycle. This study performed a comprehensive literature synthesis to explore the factors of safety and features of BIM with their association strengths. This has led to the identification of BIM based safety improvement strategies from previous studies. Expert opinions upon the identified strategies are collected using questionnaire survey and semi structured interviews. With the aim of developing a lifecycle implementation approach, strategies are distributed into different project phases and an application framework is developed. The developed framework addresses almost every important aspect of BIM adoption for safety improvement. To validate the usefulness of this framework, interviews of highly experienced professionals, who have good understanding of BIM, were conducted. Lastly, another framework integrating safety into the BIM platform is proposed for further improvement. This might motivate the industry professionals in adopting BIM which will consequently improve safety.