Entrant details
Role or Job Title on the Project
Research Associate
Employer
Employer Role
Academic or Research Institution
Are you or your employer a member of buildingSMART?
No
Submission details
Submitting Party Company Name
The University of Manchester
Submitting Party Company Location
Manchester, United Kingdom
Submitting Party Role on Project
Academic partner
Submitting Party Company Website
Full Project Name
BIM Safety Risk Library for Built Environment
Project Location (Country)
United Kingdom
Project Objectives
The project is looking to improve access to knowledge and learning relating to how best to mitigate health and safety risks for key decision-makers on construction projects over the project lifecycle, starting with project planners and designers.
openBIM Achievements
This is a part of that ongoing research in particular concentrates on presenting the developed Safety and Health Exchange (SHE) ontology and the proposed mapping to IfcOWL ontology. Mapping the developed ontology to one of the most frequently used ontology in AECO sector – IfcOWL, provides the foundation for development of an Exchange Infromation Requirements (EIR) and a Model View Definition (MVD) for safety management exchange, and the development of a rule checking system for design models against specific regulations based on the incidents in the past years in the construction sector.
openBIM used
IFC4, ifcOWL
Software used
Revit, Solibri Model Checker, BIMVision, 3D Repo .
Strategic Alignment
One of the main goals of openBIM is to empower stakeholders to develop new ways of working by transforming traditional peer-to-peer work processes where silos are broken down and project delivery and asset performance are improved. Aligned with that openBIM goal, this research establish the foundation of a decision-making tool, based on safety ontology and IfcOWL ontology, to integrate the safety concepts along with the physical models, location and construction and operational activities. Providing that kind of sematic alignment could help address health and safety risks emanating from design in the preconstruction stage.
Highlights
1- A conceptual model for risk treatment prompts in the design and planning stages including seven concepts, their sub-concepts based on available guidelines and their relationships.
2- 165 RIDDORs and 31 press releases incidents were reviewed and annotated against the seven identified concepts
3- A treatment prompt matrix based on the treatment prompt type and stage of implementation.
4- Nine scenarios and 162 treatment prompts related to fall from open/edge and in-situ concrete buildings.
5- Development of a safety and health exchange (SHE) ontology where all the concepts and relationships are identified, and the ontology is mapped to relevant classes in IFC schema (IfcOWL ontology).
6- Devlopement of a tool (SafetiBase) to identify, highlight and suggest a treatment for construction safety risks on a web based BIM platform (3D Repo).
Project Address
Sackville building, Manchester, UK
Project Type
(Other)
Size of Project
It is a research not related to specific construction project
Detailed description of the project
The work was undertaken by The University of Manchester as part of Discovering Safety. The funding for Discovering Safety from Lloyd’s Register Foundation and the data resource provided by HSE is gratefully acknowledged.
This work presents details of the Phase 1 - From March 2019 to May 2020 - of the Building Information Modelling (BIM) Risk Library Research project – which is a part of the Discovering Safety programme. The Use Case conducted a preliminary investigation into the creation of a new BIM based tool for construction industry health and safety improvement, focusing on the work of designers on projects to enhance safety management (i.e. design for Safety (DfS)). This work lays the groundwork for the development of a tool to mobilize UK Health and Safety Executive’s (HSE) archive of construction health and safety risk data.
To achieve the research aim, several inter-related tasks – academic and industrial literature review, engagement with industry experts through steering committee workshops and focus groups with consultants, collaboration with BIM software provider to develop the new platform - have been completed.
The outputs of phase 1 of this project can be summarised by the following:
1- A conceptual model for risk treatment prompts in the design and planning stages including seven concepts, their sub-concepts based on available guidelines and their relationships.
2- A treatment prompt matrix based on the treatment prompt type and stage of implementation.
3- Nine scenarios and 162 treatment prompts related to fall from open/edge and in-situ concrete buildings.
4- A csv file including the 162 treatment prompts and related scenario concepts.
5- A BIM prototype – a new version of SafetiBase in 3D Repo – where designers can identify potential risks and provide appropriate treatment prompts based on the developed csv file.
6- Development of a safety and health exchange (SHE) ontology where all the concepts and relationships are identified, and the ontology is mapped to relevant classes in IFC schema (IfcOWL ontology).
On the basis of the work done in Phase 1, future work could cover the following:
• Expanding the risk type covered in this phase (i.e. fall from open/edge) to include other prominent risks through establishing a community of practice of planners and designers who can extend the Database and review more incidents in HSE and companies’ archives.
• Evaluating the developed ontologies in real cases and aligning with other developed ontologies in the AECO domain such as IfcOwl.
• Developing a proof of concept for automatic rule-checking in 3D environment with some prominent risks (e.g. “Falling from Open/Edge”). This would explore how automatic rule-checking Add-Ins can integrate with the knowledge base in a BIM environment using ontologies and linked data.
• Developing a proof of concept for 4D modelling with some prominent risks (e.g. “Falling from Open/Edge”). This would explore how the knowledge base can be utilised in the 4D environment to take into account the impact of design and construction sequencing on health and safety.
• Developing an IDM and a MVD for safety mangement to improve the integration between BIM data and safety databases for better earlier safer decisions.
Detailed description of openBIM on the project
Aligned with the recommendations for Open Data portals’ architecture proposed by European Data Portal, this research took in consideration the two main recommendations as technical elements to be achieved. The two recommendations are: 1) Select open source software solutions and solutions that offer downloading/archiving options. 2) Build links to data held in other portals into yours, where they could be relevant for your local users.
Recommendation 1
As several BIM platforms are widely used in design, construction, operation, and maintenance stages, data heterogeneity among these software leads to a series of problems, such as interoperability issues. For providing great convenience for construction industry, a universal approach for collaborative design, construction, and operation of buildings based on open standards and workflows should be considered. OpenBIM provides solutions for these problems by reducing collaborative errors, improving the interoperability between software, and ensuring accuracy of multi-party collaboration, thus improving the efficiency of the whole project. Therefore, IFC schema was considered in this project to achieve the required interoperability to store and exchange data related to construction safety management between the different stakeholders.
Recommendation 2
As safety management domain is one of the domains going towards semantic web and the data is stored in a different way and format than BIM data. We found to improve the interoperability between BIM and safety management, it is required to take the ifcOWL ontology as a connection between the semantic web technology and the IFC standard. Also to develop a semantic bridge between HSE Archive and IFC classes. Therefore, we have developed an ontology where the data related to RIDDORs and press releases are extracted based on the classes and relationships identified in the ontology and mapped to similar classes represented in the IfcOWL.
Benefits from using openBIM
1- Minimize occupational hazards early in the design and planning process.
2- Improve collobration between Principle Designers and other stakeholders.
3- Enhance multidisciplinary data (related to safety, time and cost) analysisin built environment sector.
4- Provide a roadmap for achieving interoperability between BIM and Agent Based Modelling (ABM) for safety in construction.
"We were able to innovate using openBIM."
Our innovation can be summarised as developing the semantic bridge between HSE archive (as represented in the SHE ontology) and IfcOWL classes. This bridge can provide a knowledge database to designers and planners where they can easily access treatements to the eventuated risks in thier design.
"We were able to identify where we need openBIM to develop further."
Due to the lack of logical link in the data transformation process
from project requirement to exchange information requirements (in other words from IDM to MVD), redundant requirements and rules of data exchange may be caused. Under this circumstance, We suggest to adopted ontology theories to generate IDM for safety management and
link its MVD with formal information modellings to satisfy the requirement of identifying the intent of mapped MVDs and keeping track of the mapping issues. In addition, in order to integrate IDM
and MVD, we propose the developement of a tool to transfer ontology-based IDM from OWL/XML to mvdXML, which automatically generated MVD documents in IfcDoc tool.
I agree to be contacted about the project BIM uses outside of this awards program.
Stakeholders
University of Manchester, Manchester, Academic partner, Karim Farghaly
