BIM-Based Risk Identification and Assessment in Building Projects at their design Phase

The complexity and dynamics of construction sites, interwoven with the uncertain behaviour of human factors, may result in severe injuries in the workplace, illness, and may even lead to fatality. Despite the drafting of a strict legislative framework, the statistics in construction industry remain dissatisfactory and worrisome. Therefore, the demand for a thorough risk management process, based on automated safety modelling and preventive strategy, stands out in order to identify and eliminate potential hazards early in the design phase of a construction project, resolving thus safety issues in the field by extending traditional safety management practices. The underlying purpose of this study is to investigate whether and how Building Information Modelling (BIM) can be used within the health and safety framework to enhance risk identification and assessment in building projects at their design phase. To this aim, a case study is conducted via a BIM software, namely Revit, to develop an effective Building Information Model of a two-storey building in which safety measures are introduced according to State legislation and field practices at a specific construction phase. In the proposed way, the real-life complexity of the risk management process is simplified, due to the object-oriented approach of BIM, the variety of BIM libraries and the experiential recognition of unsafe conditions with 3D simulations in place of the non-judgmental and merely bureaucratic lawenforcement methods. In conclusion, BIM enhances the communication between engineers and workers, using interactive tools, and facilitates the Safety Officer duties in the direction of preventing potentials hazards from the early planning phases

Genetic algorithm optimization for dynamic construction site layout planning

The dynamic construction site layout planning (DCSLP) problem refers to the efficient placement and relocation of temporary construction facilities within a dynamically changing construction site environment considering the characteristics of facilities and work interrelationships, the shape and topography of the construction site, and the time-varying project needs. A multi-objective dynamic optimization model is developed for this problem that considers construction and relocation costs of facilities, transportation costs of resources moving from one facility to another or to workplaces, as well as safety and environmental considerations resulting from facilities’ operations and interconnections. The latter considerations are taken into account in the form of preferences or constraints regarding the proximity or remoteness of particular facilities to other facilities or work areas. The analysis of multiple project phases and the dynamic facility relocation from phase to phase highly increases the problem size, which, even in its static form, falls within the NP (for Nondeterministic Polynomial time)- hard class of combinatorial optimization problems. For this reason, a genetic algorithm has been implemented for the solution due to its capability to robustly search within a large solution space. Several case studies and operational scenarios have been implemented through the Palisade’s Evolver software for model testing and evaluation. The results indi­cate satisfactory model response to time-varying input data in terms of solution quality and computation time. The model can provide decision support to site managers, allowing them to examine alternative scenarios and fine-tune optimal solutions according to their experience by introducing desirable preferences or constraints in the decision process