Evaluating 4D-BIM and VR for Effective Safety Communication and Training: A Case Study of Multilingual Construction Job-Site Crew

Digital technologies (DTs) for safety education and training in construction

BACKGROUND

Digital technologies (DTs) have gained recognition for educating and training individuals, covering multiple areas in construction sector to enhance safety performance.

OBJECTIVE

The objective of this study was to conduct a systematic literature review (SLR) focusing on DTs utilized for safety education and training in the construction sector since 2000 and explore their various application areas.

METHODS

Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines were followed to conduct SLR and fifty-nine articles were identified. This study describes the research trends through bibliometric analysis, encompassing aspects such as annual publication counts, document sources, influential authors and documents, countries of origin, and prevalent research areas.

RESULTS

The results revealed that immersive virtual reality (VR) technology has seen extensive utilization in educating and training individuals. In the context of application areas, most DTs concentrated on augmenting individuals' proficiency in recognizing hazards.

CONCLUSION

The findings summarized the primary research domains, deliberated upon prevailing research gaps, and proposed forthcoming directions for applying DTs in safety training. The suggested future directions can potentially enhance safety training effectiveness within the construction firm.

A systematic review of the application of immersive technologies for safety and health management in the construction sector

INTRODUCTION

The construction industry employs about 7% of global manpower and contributes about 6% to the global economy. However, statistics have depicted that the construction industry contributes significantly to workplace fatalities and injuries despite multiple interventions (including technological applications) implemented by governments and construction companies. Recently, immersive technologies as part of a suite of industry 4.0 technologies, have also strongly emerged as a viable pathway to help address poor construction occupational safety and health (OSH) performance.

METHOD

With the aim of gaining a broad view of different construction OSH issues addressed using immersive technologies, a review on the application of immersive technologies for construction OSH management is conducted using the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analysis (PRISMA) approach and bibliometric analysis of literature. This resulted in the evaluation of 117 relevant papers collected from three online databases (Scopus, Web of Science, and Engineering Village).

RESULTS

The review revealed that literature have focused on the application of various immersive technologies for hazard identification and visualization, safety training, design for safety, risk perception, and assessment in various construction works. The review identified several limitations regarding the use of immersive technologies, which include the low level of adoption of the developed immersive technologies for OSH management by the construction industry, very limited research on the application of immersive technologies for health hazards, and limited focus on the comparison of the effectiveness of various immersive technologies for construction OSH management.

CONCLUSIONS AND PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS

For future research, it is recommended to identify possible reasons for the low transition level from research to industry practice and proffer solutions to the identified issues. Another recommendation is the study of the effectiveness of the use of immersive technologies for addressing health hazards in comparison to the conventional methods.

Research on Coal Mine Building Compliance Inspection System Based on Accident Causation and BIM in China

Coal mine construction projects have high risks, and non-compliant designs generated in the design stage will have adverse effects on subsequent construction and production stages. Therefore, it is of great importance to conduct effective preconstruction compliance inspections on coal mine construction designs. To make the compliance check of coal mine building design more rapid and effective, and to reduce the risks arising from the design phase, this study built a compliance inspection system for coal mine building design from the causes of coal mine accidents, using the Word2Vec word similarity calculation method and BIM platform secondary development technology. The system was tested and was found to be able to detect a 92.82% non-compliant component rate where the correct inspection rate was 97.68%. In addition, the inspection time for a single component was only 0.23 s. The construction of the compliance inspection system based on accident causes has changed the extensive inspection mode in the traditional manual model inspection, and the inspection no longer depends on the experience of inspectors, thus improving the efficiency and accuracy of coal mine building model inspection. The inspection focuses on the building elements with high risks, which achieves the purpose of risk control in the design stage.

Critical Analysis of the Evaluation Methods of Extended Reality (XR) Experiences for Construction Safety

The construction industry has high accident rates. The sector is exploring various tools to improve safety management, training, and awareness to achieve zero accidents. This work focuses on extended reality (XR), which encompasses virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR) technologies. Several authors have developed training experiences for construction safety in XR environments with positive conclusions about their effectiveness. However, there is no standardization regarding the evaluation methods used in the sector, and many experiences do not use any method. This lack is critical, as whenever the aim is to evaluate the degree of awareness of security issues, the implementation of evaluation systems is indispensable to make known the methods used in the literature to evaluate the effectiveness of the experiences and represent support for future research. This research identifies developments in XR experiences and analyzes the validation methods through a systematic review using the PRISMA methodology. It identifies two evaluation methods, objective and subjective, which are each broken down into four categories. The results show the types of evaluation, safety-related purposes, and safety application objectives used by the database classification.

An Empirical Analysis of Barriers to Building Information Modelling (BIM) Implementation in Wood Construction Projects: Evidence from the Swedish Context

Building information modelling is gradually being recognised by the architecture, engineering, construction, and operation industry as a valuable opportunity to increase the efficiency of the built environment. Focusing on the wood construction industry, BIM is becoming a necessity; this is due to its high level of prefabrication and complex digital procedures using wood sawing machines and sophisticated cuttings. However, the full implementation of BIM is still far from reality. The main objective of this paper is to explore the barriers affecting BIM implementation in the Swedish construction industry. An extensive literature review was conducted to extract barriers hindering the implementation of BIM in the construction industry. Secondly, barriers to the implementation of BIM in the wood construction industry in Sweden were extracted using the grounded theory methodology to analyse expert input on the phenomenon of low BIM implementation in the wood construction industry in Sweden. Thirty-four barriers were identified. The analysis of this study also led to the development of a conceptual model that recommended solutions to overcome the barriers identified to help maximise BIM implementation within the wood construction industry. Identifying the main barriers affecting BIM implementation is essential to guide organisational decisions and drive policy, particularly for governments that are considering articulating regulations to expand BIM implementation.

Impact analysis of behavior of front-line managers on employee safety behavior by integrating interpretive structural modeling and Bayesian network

Employee safety behavior, which is a basic element of enterprise work safety. The results of accident investigations and risk assessments in enterprises indicate that management factors are some of the most important factors that affect employee safety behavior. The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between the behavior of front-line managers (FLMs) and employee safety behavior by integrating a qualitative method, namely the interpretive structural modeling (ISM) and a quantitative method, namely Bayesian network (BN). The results of the BN analysis showed that safety incentives and safety communication were the best predictors of safety participation, while safety supervision and safety control were the best predictors of safety compliance. Moreover, the results revealed that an instantaneous improvement of safety communication, safety incentives, safety supervision, and safety guidance was the most effective joint measure to reach a high-level of safety behavior of employees at the workplace.

Construction Management Supported by BIM and a Business Intelligence Tool

The construction sector generates large amounts of heterogeneous and dynamic data characterized by their fragmentation throughout the life cycle of a project. Immediate and accurate access to that data is fundamental to the management, decision-making and analysis by construction owners, supervisors, managers, and technicians involved in the different phases of the project life cycle. However, since construction project data are diverse, dispersed, uncorrelated, and difficult to visualize, a reliable basis for decision-making can rarely be established by the management team. Aiming to bridge this gap, a methodology for data management during building construction by means of Data with BIM and Business Intelligence (BI) analysis tools was developed in this study. This methodology works by extracting data from 3D parametric model and integrating it with a BI tool, through which data are visualized and interrelated with the same database, the BIM model. To demonstrate the applicability of the methodology, a study case was carried out. It was shown that this methodology provides a collaborative platform for accurate data analysis to the construction management and supervision teams, allowing project stakeholders to access and update data in real-time, in permanent linkage with the BIM model. Additionally, improving the reliability of the decision-making process and ensuring project deliverability, the developed methodology contributes to a more sustainable management process by decreasing errors and resource consumption, including energy. Therefore, the main goal of this study is to present a methodology for data analysis with BIM models integrated with BI for sustainable construction management.

Collaboration and Risk in Building Information Modelling (BIM): A Systematic Literature Review

Building information modelling (BIM) has become increasingly popular in construction projects in recent years. Simultaneously, project management has received more attention from academics and practitioners worldwide. Many studies have suggested that perceiving collaboration and risk are critical for successful construction project management. This study investigates the current status and future trends in building information modeling (BIM) literature from the Web of Science database. This review systematically uses bibliometric and systematic literature review (SLR) methods through co-occurrence and co-citation analysis. First, 650 academic documents were retrieved from the Web of Science database. Then, co-occurrence and co-citation analyses were performed along with network visualization to examine research interconnections’ patterns. As a result, relevant keywords, productive authors, and important journals have been highlighted. The prominent research topics within the literature on building information modelling focus on the following topics: collaborative in BIM, integration of BIM, GIS and Internet of Things (IoT), barriers to the integration of BIM, sustainability and BIM, and risk assessment and uncertainty. Finally, the potential research directions are developing towards digital twin technology, integration of BIM and AI, and Augmented Reality (AR) and BIM. The presented findings of only 88 articles discuss the collaboration and risk issue in BIM for the construction industry and thus confirms the need for more studies on this topic to enhance the chances of successfully building information modelling projects. The review focuses only on the academic documents retrieved from the Web of Science database, thus restricting the coverage of the reviewed literature relating to building information modelling collaboration and risk.