earticle

영어

Introducing the concept of construction safety in the design/planning phase can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of safety management on construction sites. In this sense, further improvements for safety can be made by designers’ involvement in the elimination or management of design-related hazards in addition to contractors’ own efforts, as known as Prevention through Design (PtD). However, this idea has not been well materialized in construction practices due in part to the lack of a PtD tool that allows designers to automatically check and evaluate designs in terms of worker safety. The paper addresses this issue by designing and testing an automated compliance checking framework that extracts information relevant to design-related hazards from regulatory documents and maps it to each of related design components using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Building Information Modeling (BIM). The proposed framework has two key functions: 1) automatically extracting machine-readable regulation information relevant to design-related hazards using NLP techniques; and 2) automatically mapping such information to corresponding design components in a building information model, enabling the visualization of hazards. How all these components work to automatically display design-related hazards and relevant regulatory information is illustrated with a three-story building, focusing on fall protection. The proposed framework successfully extracted regulation information from textual documents with about 90% of precision and recall rates. It also correctly identified all the hazards in the case study model. The automated framework is expected to facilitate safety design review by improving designers and contractors’ proactive responses against design-related hazards