This report presents the work undertaken during the Phase 2 – from June 2020 to June 2021 – of the BIM Risk Library Use Case of the Discovering Safety programme. Continuing with the work reported in the BIM Risk Library Final Report (Phase 1), the new version of SafetiBase, which was developed by 3D Repo based on collaboration with the Discovering Safety team, moved from a prototype to a piloting phase. The Risk Library, implemented within this platform, was deployed across multiple projects from the industry partners that joined the Community of Practice established by the Use Case team.
These industry partners piloted the new version of SafetiBase in a range of construction projects of different types, including residential, commercial, industrial, and infrastructure projects. New risk scenarios and treatments were retrieved from the pilot projects to improve the Risk Library knowledgebase.
Concurrently, risk scenario were also retrieved from the UK Health and Safety Executive’s (HSE) Archive data, for which a Natural Language Inference (NLI) approach was proposed to automatically classify free text into target categories.
This Phase of the Use Case evaluated the implementation of the Risk Library within a 3D BIM environment, as well as the data structure that underpins it, through qualitative research methods. Furthermore, the Use Case also conducted an investigation into the applicability of these concepts in a 4D BIM environment, focusing on how 4D can be exploited to enhance the safety risk identification process. The main findings of this Use Case are outlined below:
- Upon completion of the pilot project phase, the Risk Library contain 401 treatments for 31 different risk scenarios related to 11 risk categories.
- The NLI experimental work demonstrated that the approach is a viable way for automatically classifying accident records into an accident kind category, which is related to the Risk Library schema.
- Evaluation of the new version of SafetiBase using expert survey and individual interviews showed that the tool has practical utility in industry. Suggestions to further enhance the practical utility of the tool were also offered by the participants in the evaluation activities.
- Overall, the Phase 2 study shows the benefits that the Risk Library can bring to the implementation of design for safety in the construction industry. Design professionals should be encouraged to engage with it to promote its wide use in industry and its continuous development.
Aims and objectives
Phase 2 of the Risk Library Use Case had several key aims. These were: (1) to expand the Risk Library developed during Phase 1 by including more risk scenarios and treatments; (2) to evaluate its implementation within a BIM environment through a series of Pilot projects with industry; (3) to explore implementation of the risk scenario/treatment ontology and Risk Library within a 4D BIM environment; (4) to explore methodologies for capturing risk scenarios from the HSE archive using automated data processing techniques.
To achieve the above aims the following objectives were established:
- Expand the Risk Library from HSE Archive data
- Engage with industry partners to pilot the implementation of the Risk Library within the new version of 3D Repo’s SafetiBase
- Prepare a user manual for pilot project participants
- Expand the Risk Library from pilot projects’ data
- Hold a series of 4D workshops with industry to explore implementation of the Risk Library within a 4D BIM environment
- Evaluate the new version of 3D Repo’s SafetiBase from practitioners’ perspective