AUTOMATED HAZARD IDENTIFICATION FRAMEWORK FOR THE PROACTIVE CONSIDERATION OF CONSTRUCTION SAFETY

Introducing the concept of construction safety in the design/engineering phase can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of safety management on construction sites. In this sense, further improvements for safety can be made in the design/engineering phase through the development of (1) an automated hazard identification process that is little dependent on user knowledge, (2) an automated construction schedule generation to accommodate varying hazard information over time, and (3) a visual representation of the results that is easy to understand. In this paper, we formulate an automated hazard identification framework for construction safety by extracting hazard information from related regulations to eliminate human interventions, and by utilizing a visualization technique in order to enhance users' understanding on hazard information. First, the hazard information is automatically extracted from textual safety and health regulations (i.e., Occupational Safety Health Administration (OSHA) Standards) by using natural language processing (NLP) techniques without users' interpretations. Next, scheduling and sequencing of the construction activities are automatically generated with regard to the 3D building model. Then, the extracted hazard information is integrated into the geometry data of construction elements in the industry foundation class (IFC) building model using a conformity-checking algorithm within the open source 3D computer graphics software. Preliminary results demonstrate that this approach is advantageous in that it can be used in the design/engineering phases of construction without the manual interpretation of safety experts, facilitating the designers' and engineers' proactive consideration for improving safety management.