Project Rule-Checking for Enhancing Workers Safety in Preserving Heritage Building

Historical building refurbishments as a whole and rich environment can be affected by many variations, due to non-calculated risks and hidden problems during construction, so that the original projects are distorted. These risks involve many problems: time lengthening, cost increase and, when conditions are unfavourable, the possible exposure of workers to the probability of having accidents. This study, in the early design phase, focused on tools and methods able to reveal interferences, allowing them to be solved in the design phase. Risk evaluation is a fundamental procedure that allows actors, whoever they are (stakeholders, planners, decision-makers and implementers), to identify measures of prevention/mitigation and to schedule implementation, improvement and control. We propose to demonstrate how the risk, declined in the main aspects that affect the construction industry, can be modelled properly and reduced thanks to the innovation of existing design methods and tools. Particularly, we maintain that tool transformation, often related to a profound change of methods and vice versa, may lead to the study of the relationships between design, building and activities, collaboratively including actors in the design process. To cope with complex problems, BIM models should be able to implement and manipulate multiple sets of entities, qualified by clearly established relationships, belonging to comprehensive structured and oriented (sub-)systems. Given the state of the art and the potential not yet fully expressed by 4/5D BIM systems in the field of Project Management (PM), this paper reports on on-going research oriented to formalise Design knowledge based on field experience, made possible by a particularly positive convergence where the authors have been contractually designated by an international private company well known in the fashion sector for leading coordination among different specialists in the challenging functional restoration works of a significant historical building, known as “Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana”, also known as “Square Coliseum”. To arrive at a real integration among the architectural design solutions of the project, the protection of the listed building and the implementation of safety measures, a methodology has been developed that allows a continuous exchange/upgrade of information among these entities. The operative mid-term results can be subdivided into two levels: (1) one, more pragmatic, has been to boost workers’ education about non-standard operative tasks by means of accurate construction narrative visualization; (2) another one, more theoretically, oriented towards model “judgment-based” rules aimed at supporting automated reasoning in Safety Costs’ evaluation and assessment.