PAS 1192-6 is imminent

1 February 2018

Guest Article from Dave Carr, Managing Director of Callsafe Services Limited and BIMsafe Limited

PAS 1192-6, Specification for collaborative sharing and use of structured Health and Safety information using BIM, is likely to be published early in February 2018. For obvious reasons, this article is based on the latest draft of the PAS, but it is likely that there will not be significant changes within the final version.

The increased use of 'Building Information Modelling' (BIM) for both building and infrastructure projects provides greater opportunities to identify 'foreseeable risk' much earlier, and continuously, throughout project and asset lifecycles, and to communicate the risks more clearly for use by others.

PAS 1192-6 provides the processes with which we can obtain the greatest benefit from BIM and 3D models with regards to health and safety management of the construction project and subsequent facilities or assets management.

The scope of PAS 1192-6 is to provide a specification on how to use H&S information in order to:

provide a safer and healthier environment for end-users;
mitigate the inherent hazards and risks across the asset lifecycle;
result in improved construction H&S performance, fewer incidents and associated impacts;
Provide for clearer, more assured and relevant H&S information to the 'right-people'
reduce construction and operational costs.

This should enable efficient and effective exchange and use of H&S information by:

representation of the nature and characteristics of the project, site and built asset;
representation of H&S hazards, risks and associated factors;
the generalization, dissemination and re-use of H&S knowledge and experience

The general requirements of PAS 1192-6 are to ensure effective communication of health and safety issues, and the methods for achieving this should firstly be stated with the Employers Information Requirements (EIR) and then the project team determines how these requirements will be achieved on the project, and state these within the BIM Execution Plan (BEP)

This should include for:

progressive development of H&S information;
a robust structure and managed system to record H&S information for BIM and non-BIM projects;
enabling proactive risk assessment;
the use of a Common Data Environment (CDE);
a system for the design of entities, annotations and attributes; and
the use for communicating and learning within the construction project team and post-construction, for the facilities/asset management.

PAS 1192-6 includes the following sections:

Scope, as per above
Normative references, making reference to the other standards and publicly available specifications related to BIM
Terms and definitions, containing the definitions pertaining to BIM and health & safety
Applying the PAS – General, containing general requirements
Participant implementation strategies, the strategies for the client, designers, contractors, commissioning, end users and supply chain
Implementation of information requirements, including the grading descriptions of likelihood, consequence and level of risk for risk assessment purposes
Representation in documents, including an example of tabular risk information
Representation in COBie (Construction Operations Building information exchange), including the representation of information attached to the 3D model
Context and Risk information attributes
Classification of risks
Representation of risk information

The application of the PAS 1192-6 requirements to BIM projects is likely to become a contractual requirement very quickly.

Even if PAS 1192-6 is not contractually required, its application should provide for the project team with a method of achieving legal compliance with health and safety law, particularly the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations, in an effective and efficient way, also providing evidence of compliance.

We will report in the next issue of Callsafe Today on the publication of this PAS.