Health and Safety Design by means of a Systemic Approach - Linking Construction Entities and Activities for Hazard Prevention

Education and Research in Computer Aided Architectural Design in Europe faces many urgent tasks. Among the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC)international scientific societies, only few researches systematically investigate on how to integrate the design solutions with Health and Safety (HS) planning measures, enhancing a collaborative “fusion” of all involved actors in Design and Construction decision making. Process automation cannot be enhanced until design/management tools, such as Building Information Models, can rely only on entities formalised "per se" geometrical items fulfilled by isolated-object specific information. To face complex problems, BIM models should be able to implement and manipulate multiple sets of entities, qualified by clearly established relationships, belonging to organically structured and oriented (sub-) systems. This paper reports on an early stage research project, focused on the identification of operative rules for Health and Safety design. Implementation on the unique case study of "Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana" functional refurbishment faces two main objectives: one, more pragmatic, is concerned with boosting workers education about non-standard operative tasks, by means of accurate ad-hoc construction narrative visualisation; another one, more challenging and theoretically complex, consists in modelling "judgment-based" rules, aimed at supporting automated reasoning in Safety Design.