Guest speaker at our recent webinar for health and safety and researcher at The University of Manchester, Karim Ibrahim, speaks briefly about PAS 1192-6 and the Discovering Safety project. Read on to learn more…
PAS 1192-6
PAS 1192-6 is the specification for collaborative sharing and use of structured Health and Safety information using BIM. It originated from Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015 (CDM 2015).
The three requirements of CDM 2015 are:
- Consider the general principles of prevention when carrying out their work.
- Provide information about the risks arising from their design.
- Coordinate their work with that of others to improve the way in which risks are managed and controlled.
These requirements flow through to PAS 1192-6 as seen in clause 4.2, however they are written specifically for the sharing of digital information:
- Adopt a Health and Safety management strategy across the project lifecycle.
- Generate, use, and share health and safety information based on requirements, expectations, and deliverables specific to each participant’s role.
- Populate relevant and structured health and safety information models of the project and built asset using consistent information exchange format.
Karim offers some key ingredients for those wanting to achieve PAS 1192-6, which includes having an effective common data environment (CDE), a soft landing, and a collaborative process. Karim also mentions that there are three key terms to understand from PAS 1192-6 and those are Risk Information Cycle, Elevated Risk, and Semantic Enrichment.
Discovering Safety
An opportunity was borne out of PAS 1192-6 to deliver health and safety benefits through a data-driven global community. Funded by Lloyd’s Register Foundation, with support from Thomas Ashton Institute, HSE, and The University of Manchester, comes the Discovering Safety project.
One of the initiatives that has come out of the Discovering Safety project is the digital health and safety risk library – BIM approach. The hypothesis is that most accidents in construction are predictable and can be prevented during the design and planning phases if the appropriate digital tools are utilised by the designers and planners.
To make this happen, the project team have combined the useful information available to them from the HSE database, standards, and other databases to create an industry-wide knowledge bank.
There are two ways in which these digital tools can help to enhance safety in design:
Prevention (share and identify):
- Hazard identification
- Treatment prompts suggestion
- Training using serious games to teach people how to deal with safety
Reaction (use and generalise):
- Hazard visualisation in a BIM platform
- Automatic rule checking
- Risk prediction using machine learning and artificial intelligence based on all the data in the knowledge bank
Phase 1 Outputs
One of the outputs of phase 1 so far includes a standardised approach to hazard identification, based on available data on previously recorded incidents from the industry. Data was taken from 196 different incidents.
A second output is the creation of treatment prompts. The treatment prompts were created through interviews and focus groups with industry experts, and the result is a data set of treatment prompts for each type of scenario which has been made available in CSV format and uploaded to SafetiBase.
Thirdly, the project team have been working with 3D Repo to craft the hazard visualisation inside 3D Repo’s digital construction platform.
Lastly, the project team are working on automatic rule checking for use during the planning and design phases.
See the video presentation as part of 3D Repo’s webinar on health and safety https://youtu.be/NCSSGoyg9Lc
To learn more about Discovering Safety visit https://www.discoveringsafety.com/
