ADOPTING BUILDING INFORMATION MODELING (BIM) TO IMPROVE WORKERS' SAFETY

Abstract

Building Information Modeling (BIM) has been identified as a prevention through design (PtD) tool to aid in improving safety in the construction industry (Furst, 2009). This research focuses on construction safety in Singapore and investigates on the relationship between implementation of BIM for safety and its impact on workers’ safety. The effectiveness of BIM is scrutinized through the help of the 3P + 1I model which measures the effectiveness of the Safety Management System (SMS) through subvariables under each factor (i.e Policy, Personnel, Process and Incentive factors). Exploratory and pilot studies were used to formulate the survey questionnaire. The survey questionnaires were sent out to local contractors and 31 sets of useable data were collected. Results were analyzed using sum of ranking to see the ranking of importance of the subvariables and mean value ranking and t-test were used to identify BIM’s effectiveness on these sub-variables. Lastly, Spearman’s Correlations was used to study the relationship between the importance of the sub-variables and BIM’s effect on the subvariables under each factor. The overall results show that BIM is able to significantly improve the Process, Personnel and Incentive factor and eventually improve the effectiveness of SMS to improve workers’ safety. From the analysis, a framework on how BIM is able to improve construction safety was constructed. The framework can be served as a review on how BIM can help construction companies achieve improvement in safety. Also, a flow chart was generated to help improve BIM software through proper prioritizing of BIM software research focus. The relatively low number of responses and subjectivity of the data amounts to the limitation of this research. Recommendations are made to construction firms and safety personnel on the subvariable that are more important in improving safety and the importance of BIM on these sub-variables. Recommendations are also made to BIM software engineers on sub-variables that are more important to their own research to improve BIM for safety.