Near-miss information visualization tool in BIM for construction safety

Although the number of fatalities experienced by the U.S. construction industry has been declining, the magnitude of the decrease has stagnated in recent years. Several improvements have been realized in visualizing construction-project information through building information modeling (BIM). One improvement in construction safety can be found in the collection, analysis, and visualization of safety-leading indicator data including near-miss events. Furthermore, the visualization of reported near misses can assist safety managers to identify high-frequency and high-severity events within a construction site for mitigation or hazard removal techniques. The objective of this research is to provide a framework for near-miss data collection and visualization within a BIM platform. A near-miss database was created in a commercially available BIM design software to allow construction-site personnel to report near misses and visualize within an existing BIM. Algorithms were created to enable filtering for visualization based on user input properties of each individual near miss. A feasibility study for the created tool was conducted with an expert review panel of experienced safety managers. Contributions of this research include a near-miss visualization user interface allows construction personnel to view near misses throughout a construction project to identify hazardous areas and frequency of near misses as well as feasibility study data of the created tool.