Opportunities for Using Building Information Modeling to Improve Worker Safety Performance

Abstract

Building information modelling (BIM) enables the creation of a digital representation of a designed facility combined with additional information about the project attributes, performance criteria, and construction process. Users of BIM tools point to the ability to visualize the final design along with the construction process as a beneficial feature of using BIM. Knowing the construction process in relationship to a facility's design benefits both safety professionals when planning worker safety measures for a project and designers when creating a project's design. Success in using BIM to enhance safety partly depends on the familiarity of project personnel with BIM tools and the extent to which the tools can be used to identify and eliminate safety hazards. In a separate, ongoing study, the authors investigated the connection between BIM and safety to document the opportunities, barriers, and impacts. Utilizing an on-line survey of project engineers who work for construction firms together with a comprehensive literature review, the study found those who use BIM feel that it aids in communication of project information and project delivery, both of which have been found to have positive impacts on construction site safety. Further, utilizing the survey results, the authors apply the binary logistic regression econometric framework to better understand the factors that lead to safety professionals believing that BIM increases safety in the work place. In addition, according to the survey results, a large percentage of the engineers who use BIM feel that ultimately it helps to eliminate safety hazards and improve worker safety. The study findings suggest that improvements in safety performance across the construction industry may be due in part to increased use of BIM in the construction industry.

Implementation of Construction 4.0 in Nigeria: Evaluating the Opportunities and Threats on the Workforce

“…Pitroda and Rajgor (2013) opines that workers safety is an important reason for automating an industrial process, as automated systems often remove workers from the workplace, thus protecting them against hazards in the plant environment. Moreover, the use of new technologies such as drones and BIM minimises accidents by performing distant inspections and discover hazards which avails the construction teams the vital information required to ensure health and safety on the construction sites (Alomari, Gambatese & Anderson, 2017;Raphelson, 2019). When risks are minimized, the industry is assured of increased efficiency and productivity of the workers.…”

A Research Framework of Mitigating Construction Accidents in High-Rise Building Projects via Integrating Building Information Modeling with Emerging Digital Technologies

“…They supported their claim by presenting evidence, such as high prices, cultural limitations, insufficient BIM skills and training sessions, government policies, security concerns, inadequate industry standards, lack of incentives to incorporate BIM in construction projects, and resistance to change. However, the literature study also supports their viewpoint that various restrictions and limitations prevent the implementation of BIM in construction projects [117]. For example, the purchase cost of VR and AR headsets with complete features for use in construction projects could be as low as $500 [42] while the cost of hardware components, such as laptops, tablets, and motion trackers, and the cost of support systems could easily rise to $5000.…”

Investigating the impact of emerging technologies on construction safety performance

“…BIM is an information resource that provides opportunities to add, remove, update or modify information to the building model throughout its lifecycle (WBDG, 2021). Studies show that BIM improves construction safety (Alomari et al, 2017;Cort es-P erez et al, 2020;Enshassi et al, 2016). In addition, there are studies in which BIM is used together with other emerging technologies (Asadzadeh et al, 2020;Mzyece et al, 2019;Yuan et al, 2019).…”