Accident prevention through design (PtD): Integration of building information modeling and PtD knowledge base

摘要

Eliminating safety risks at the front end of a construction project ranks at the top of the hierarchy of control, and the concept of Prevention through Design (PtD) aims to address the life cycle safety of workers during the project design stage. Referring to existing safety regulations, documents, and best practices, construction safety risks and their pre-control measures as well as the relationships among them were identified and then stored in a PtD knowledge base. Based on the algorithm for extracting and judging specific data information in Revit, an automated rule-based inspection plug-in combining Building Information Modeling (BIM) and PtD knowledge base was developed. The developed plug-in sent the feedback to designers through pop-up alert windows containing construction risk identification numbers (IDs) and the corresponding pre-control measure IDs in the Revit model. The effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach were also verified by professionals. This research realized accident PtD by integrating the BIM and PtD knowledge base; this approach can help to automatically assess safety risks during the design phase. Therefore, this approach can also increase the willingness and capacity of designers to implement PtD and improve safety performance of the construction industry.