a b s t r a c t   Automatic identification of construction safety issues using Building Information Models requires an understanding of the safety risk drivers that are detectable during the design phase。 However, literature is scarce on risk identification tools and no set of drivers has been suggested to date to address construc- tion accidents。 Plenty of accidents do occur under circumstances that can be distinguished by analyzing project documents, but available BIM-based tools are currently limited to checking the clauses of safety standards。 This research provides five sets of safety risk drivers that can influence either the probability or the consequences of an accident, the application of which helps identify more than 40% of potential fatal- ities in construction projects。 The results reflect the design attributes and environmental conditions found playing a key role in the occurrence of 363 accidents reported by three different sources, and are associated with object oriented rules that are classified into four categories depending on how they are to be processed by rule checking engines。 The so classified drivers can be checked to determine if safety risks are likely to arise in a project, while they maintain an acceptable level of comprehensiveness as BIM technologies progress。84966

1。Introduction

1。1。Design for safety

Two decades after Hinze and Wiegand (1992) concluded that no more than one-third of the design firms were taking occupational safety of construction workers into account, planning for safety has been brought all the way forward to the design phase to reduce the overwhelming rate of accidents in the construction industry。 Although contractors are responsible for safety, designers consid- ering safety standards and best practices can prevent certain acci- dents from recurring (Behm, 2005)。 The fundamental role of safety measures included within drawings or method statements in reducing safety risks has been confirmed by Holt (2001) and Zou and Sunindijo (2015)。

The complexity and uncertainty inherent in the nature of the construction industry requires safety planners to adopt technolo- gies as recent and innovative as available to make sure they are covering predictable surprises as much as possible。 Integrated design approaches accompanied by multidimensional visualization technology and Building Information Modeling (BIM) have helped along the automated identification, assessment and treatment of

⇑  Corresponding  author。

E-mail address: ardeshir@aut。ac。ir (A。 Ardeshir)。

construction safety risks during the design phase。 While academic researchers have already realized the great potential of such inno- vative technologies for safety planning (Zhou et al。, 2015), practi- tioners say they are doubtful if they will have their safety records improved by using BIM (Ganah and John, 2014)。 In fact, ‘‘only an integrated approach 。。。 [successful] in providing the com- petence of all domains” (Zhang et al。, 2015) will be accepted by the industry, whereas, practically speaking, available BIM-based appli- cations designed for safety planning lack either generality or integrity。

Among the various areas of concern to researchers, hazard of falls and falling objects – as the leading causes of deadly accidents in the construction industry – have been frequently studied to con- sider an approach to Design for Safety (DfS)。 Zhang et al。 (2013), for example, developed a rule-based system which automatically inspects the 3D models of a conventional building at particular milestones to check whether fall prevention measures, as required by the codes of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), are in place。 A major problem when developing this type of systems is, as the authors state, the manual interpretation of rules which must be translated into machine language (Zhang et al。, 2013)。