Identifying Falling-from-Height Hazards in Building Information Models: A Voxelization-Based Method

Falling from height (FFH) is a major safety accident in the architectural/engineering/construction industry and should be prevented as early as possible. Although the current building information modeling (BIM)-based FFH identification methods can locate the FFH hazards. they have various limitations including additional modeling workload, high computational intensiveness, and unreliable performance. In this research, we propose a novel BIM-based method that uses voxels to detect FFH hazards. The result of the validation test shows that the method can generate a more accurate and informative output within less elapsed time than the traditional geometry-based method. The primary contribution of the research lies in that by introducing voxels, the proposed method not only can detect where the FFH hazards are but also can tell if they can be accessed, thus increasing the accuracy of the FFH hazard identification output. Therefore, this method is significant for the early detection and elimination of the potential FFH hazards in building information models.