Digital Health and Safety Risk Library Use Case

Key findings

The work done and evidence gathered from Phase 2 of the BIM Risk Library Use Case validates the original conceptual risk scenario/treatment ontology and the premise that health and safety in construction is open to improvement via proactive use of a tool linked to a digital BIM model. The implementation of the Risk Library within an existing commercial cloud-based BIM tool, namely 3D Repo – SafetiBase, was well received by industry practitioners and enabled the exploitation of both 3D and 4D functionalities.

Piloting the tool with a wide variety of projects in industry proved that the concept of a digital tool to assist in safety management is sound. Visualising safety information within a BIM environment provides context to the identified risks, which enhances communicating risks to other stakeholders. Subsequently, this approach provides an opportunity to mitigate these risks with improved design, construction methods, and planning.

The Pilot Projects also enabled further data to be collected from industry regarding real risk scenarios and treatments from live projects: this data feeding into a growing risk library database of potential value for all industry to use and share.

The authors believe the Risk Library is a promising means to leverage knowledge and regulations on construction safety across multiple projects and organisations – the methods for expanding the Risk Library also facilitating the continuous improvement of the knowledge base. In particular, automatic classification of free text into the Risk Library categories allows gaining semantic information from documented past events.

In addition to the general conclusions, there are several issues of note of relevance for the further use/development of the tool and further development of a risk library:

• The ontology used to characterise risk scenarios provides information consistency and a way for structuring information uniformly across projects and across companies. This has the potential to create a uniformity of approach in the future. Several pilot project participants commented on the potential positive outcomes of structuring risk data uniformly, in design, maintenance and operations of buildings.
• The creation of an embryonic risk library from Phase 1 and Phase 2 work holds great potential for further development that connects with wider societal ambitions to create open, trustworthy data eco-systems for the benefit of all (c.f. the Open Data Institute: https://theodi.org/). The open sharing of data related to construction risks and their treatment would potentially advance national and international practices.
• The use of the digital health and safety tool was noted as a valuable learning tool opportunity for future designers. The learning potential of the Tool could be researched in the future.
• Several Pilots noted how the Tool is very useful for more unusual, unique risks encountered on projects, rather than routine risks.
• The use of the Tool to assist on projects in 4D generated much interest from industry (see Section 3.5). Use of a “dynamic” risk register in a 4D environment was noted as particularly exciting and innovative. Use of the Tool challenged and changed working practices and the role of designers in the risk/treatment identification process. Whilst different pilot projects approached use of the Tool differently (i.e. team approach / individual designer approach), there were some commonalities. For example, the use of Excel spreadsheets to capture and communicate risks to contractors was questioned, as well as the formatting/structuring of the spreadsheets.
• The contractual relationships and organisational set-up between clients and design teams on different pilot projects effected use of the Tool. Very positive use of the Tool and feedback was received from pilots where the client managed designers themselves in-house; more challenging situations arising where clients/designers were separated by contracts and distance.
• One pilot project advanced the innovative use of the tool by integrating it with their own procurement and tendering process: assessing tendering parties through their use of the digital tool in identifying solutions to design questions.
• The risk scenario and treatment validation process was time consuming. It is suggested that this process needs to be streamlined and made more efficient moving forward. One potential solution would be to have 3 treatments per scenario. Consultation with the Community of Practice on this issue is advised.
• Working at scale challenge: Phase 2 work proved the veracity of the BIM risk library concept and the value of a digital tool to assist designers working on projects with health and safety on a small number of projects from diverse sectors. A challenge now is to scale up usage across industry. This is a multi-faceted challenge requiring attention on several issues: communication/publicity; senior management support and drive; software issues (extension from 3D Repo/SafetiBase); more explicit value data generation from tool use at company/project level (metrics); tackling contractual/organisational challenges with use of tool.
• Potential HSE benefits: exploration of potential benefits to HSE from the Tool and the NLP approach to interrogating the HSE archive could be investigated. For example, the ontology concepts employed for the risk scenario definition could be integrated with HSE investigator work sheets/reports so there is an integration of concepts and more integrated workflows at multiple levels. The NLI approach employed in Phase 2 opens up options to do statistical analysis of HSE resources (e.g. RIDDORs analysis for % type of accidents, projects, etc).
• The NLP work has laid groundwork for further HSE archive interrogation: the NLI coding could be matured into a tool, with further methodological refinements made if required (annotation of data and sampling/checking for heterogeneity and accuracies).