The first steering committee meeting for the BIM project took place at the University of Manchester, attended by 14 construction sector representatives from industry (Jacobs, AEC, Arup, Costain, Arcadis), academia (University of Manchester) and government agencies (HSE and the Environment Agency).
Steve Naylor (Discovering Safety) and William Collinge (University of Manchester) spoke about the aims of the project in the context of the overarching Discovering Safety Programme, and some of the key challenges.
Bill Hewlett (Costain) presented a scheme using a 12 level risk scale to score a design across 16 life-cycle stages. This allows an accept/reject decision at design review based on breaches of score thresholds that are specified for each life-cycle stage, and can used with respect to health, safety and environmental harm.
Tim Yates (HSE) presented preliminary work on text-mining methodology being developed with the National Centre for Text Mining. The work aims to extract information for RIDDOR reports and other health and safety documentation, which will later allow semantic search to be used as part of a design risk register tool.
Karim Ibrahim (University of Manchester) gave an overview of a systematic review of academic literature related to Health and Safety management systems for construction design and BIM, and invited suggestions for further useful categories to encode the findings. He then discussed Design For Safety, presented current and developing interfaces to BIM, and took suggestions from the audience for preferred functionality and requirements for a tool, whose design is a key milestone of the current project.
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