Title: Visualisation: an aid to safety management

Authors: Bonaventura H.W. Hadikusumo, Steve Rowlinson

Addresses: School of Civil Engineering, Asian Institute of Technology, P.O. Box 4, Klong Luang, Pathumthani, 12120, Thailand. Dept of Real Estate and Construction, The University of Hong Kong, 5/F Knowles Building, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong

Abstract: Safety hazard identification is an important task in preventing accidents. If a safety hazard is not identified, the necessary action to remove, reduce or control the hazard cannot be undertaken. This paper discusses the practice of safety hazard identification and its problems in construction projects, such as method of safety hazard identification used and the time required for this. One of the most obvious problems is that, in construction projects, safety hazard identification is conducted by site inspections during the construction stage. This leads to an inadequate amount of time to conduct a risk assessment study in order to control the hazard identified. The potential benefits of using VR to overcome the problems were investigated. VR can be used to represent the construction project at the completion of the design stage. By using the safety database, which is also developed in this study, the VR representation can be analysed to identify possible safety hazards and to assign preventive measures at the completion of design stage (before the construction stage). The result of this investigation and some solutions to technical problems are discussed.

Keywords: virtual reality; safety; design; simulation; hazard identification; construction industry; accident prevention.

DOI: 10.1504/IJIEM.2003.003247

International Journal of Internet and Enterprise Management, 2003 Vol.1 No.2, pp.223 - 243

Published online: 05 Aug 2003 *

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