Non-monotonic Spatial Reasoning for Safety Analysis in Construction

Abstract

We present a new approach based on spatial reasoning in Answer Set Programming (ASP), and a prototype software tool, for automatically evaluating construction safety compliance of real-world Building Information Models (BIM) that have both a geometric component and temporal component in the form of a construction plan and schedule (4D BIM). In the 4D BIM domain, geometries of building objects are large and complex making it highly impractical to represent geometries as ASP facts, unoptimised spatial reasoning can be prohibitively slow, and rounding errors in floating point arithmetic often result in logical contradictions. Our novel framework addresses these challenges by integrating a specialised geometry database, built-in spatial optimisations, and support for real arithmetic solving. We empirically evaluate our prototype software tool on two large 4D BIM models from real buildings to demonstrate the practicality and scalability of our new framework to real-world workplace hazard prevention tasks in construction safety-in-design analysis.