The UK Health and Safety Executive are concerned that safety should be as much a key aspect in design as it is during construction and operation. They would like designers to be aware of the risks that may result from design decisions taken. This means making health and safety guidance readily available to designers and in a manner that promotes awareness of health and safety risk.
novaCITYNETS is proud to announce that Jeffrey Wix Consulting Ltd has selected FORNAX™ – Plan Check Expert from novaCITYNETS to demonstrate a prototype system in which proposed buildings can be tested against health and safety requirements that are graded according to levels of risk.
Background
Falls on building sites and during maintenance is the largest cause of accidents at work in the UK. Several years ago it became a requirement that the designer of a building consider the safety implications of the design, and to provide a report to the contractor.
These CDM (Construction, Design and Maintenance) regulations have had less impact on these statistics than was hoped for. So the HSE (Health and Safety Executive) are looking at the potential for automated assessment of safety.
Focus
The focus of the project is ‘roof lights’. The risk of a fall from the roof of a building is frequently associated with the roof lights and in particular:
- Their arrangement, for example if they are close together then someone fixing one roof light may fall through another.
- Their product design, some materials are more fragile than others, some roof-lights project about 100mm above the roof.
- Their installation: some are fitted from below and some from above, which affects the appropriate access methods.
- Their maintenance: if the roof light needs replacing more often than the roofing material then this additional complexity can increase the risk.
Rules for Assessment
The rules defined for the automated assessment of safety involve knowledge of the roof, roof light, and handrail objects, the building, the site as a whole and the relationships that exist between these objects.
Software Product
UK Health & Safety Executive project uses FORNAX™ developed by novaCITYNETS, the first in the world software product developed for the automated building code checking. Object based CAD systems export data in the IFC format to a database provided by EPM a/s.
This represents our 1st success in Europe.
Comments are closed.