Automated Safety Planning of Scaffolding-Related Hazards in Building Information Modeling (BIM)

Scaffolds are frequently used in construction projects. Despite the impact on the entire safety, scaffolds are rarely analyzed as part of the safety planning. While recent advances in BIM (Building Information Modeling) provides opportunity to address potential safety issues in the early planning stages, it is still labor-intensive and challenging to incorporate scaffolds into current manual jobsite safety analysis which is time-consuming and error-prone. Consequently, potential safety hazards related to scaffolds are identified and presented during the construction phase. The objective of this research is to integrate scaffolds into automated safety analysis using BIM. A safety checking system was created to simulate the movements of scaffolds along the paths of crews using the scaffolds. Algorithms in the system automatically identify safety hazards related to activities working on scaffolds. Then, the system was implemented in a commercially available BIM software program for case studies. The results show that the algorithms successfully identified safety hazards that were not noticed by project managers of the projects. The results were visualized in BIM to facilitate early safety communications.