ASHVIN’s Approach to Safety in the Construction Industry

In April, the United Nations commemorates World Day for Safety and Health at Work, and in May, World Labours Day to promote fundamental rights in the workplace. At ASHVIN, we are committed to improving safety in the construction sector through our digital innovations, as current levels are unacceptable.

In the European Union, the construction industry is by far the most dangerous occupation, with a very high rate of fatalities compared to all other sectors. With ASHVIN solutions, we aim reducing accident rates by 50%. More concretely, our ASHVIN tools SMT, 4DV-D, EBD and GEN will ensure that, despite the dynamic nature of the construction environment and the active involvement of various stakeholders, it becomes a strategic data-driven industry with safety planning integrated into all the phases.

ASHVIN Tools supporting safety at all phases of construction

Due to the highly varying nature of construction, project layouts keep changing frequently, but safety planners often need to be made aware of the changes and their ramifications. Therefore, the SMT ASHVIN tool will allow safety managers to understand possible safety hazards on site by analyzing past construction activities without targeting individual workers.

Safety issues are often introduced in early product development phases. Frequently experienced problems arise when decisions of the architectural/engineering design team are made without considering safety factors. That is why in an early stage of the design, the GEN ASHVIN tool will allow designers to automatically generate many alternatives based on a specific set of input parameters. Ultimately, users can score each alternative based on developed productivity, resource efficiency, and safety KPIs.

At the same early design stage, the EBD ASHVIN tool will help identify design patterns from past digital twin data. These design patterns will be formulated in practical rules that can be queried by designers providing predictions, warnings and recommendations which ensure the creation of high-quality designs. Finally, the outputs of the EBD tool are used for developing the GEN Tool’s parametric model.

A more visual ASHVIN Tool is 4DV-C, which will allow us to visualise the effects of specific design options on productivity, resource efficiency, and safety while protecting workers’ privacy. In addition, this application allows different options to be compared by visualising projected construction sequences.

Digitalisation contribution to safety working principles

The large-scale adoption of digital twin technologies with supporting methods to design, plan and control for safety will play a significant role in improving the sector. Furthermore, by including safety issues throughout the whole construction process (design, engineering and maintenance) through our digital twin platform and the digital twin toolbox, we will contribute to the fundamental principle of safety in the workplace.

At the same time, the ASHVIN team is working to ensure the privacy rights of individual workers, machine operators, and other personnel by specifically developing guidelines and corresponding means for automated compliance to these guidelines that holistically take all means of data collection and storage into account. This second aspect is equally important compared to developing sophisticated digital twin-tracking solutions, as workers’ privacy rights must be protected to collect more accurate data to inform safety managers.