Building Information Modelling Supporting Safety and Security Threats Management: A Literature Review

The construction sector is experiencing a period of renewal in recent years, encouraged by international directives and national regulations worldwide. The most evident advances are represented by the introduction of BIM-based technology. Ensuring safety and security for the built environment is a concern for policy makers, regulations bodies, building owners and managers and for professionals. Applying BIM to address such a relevant objective can bring several benefits such as a better control over the project, greater quality and an optimized planning and execution of emergency management operations. In this paper, a systematic literature review is carried out to evaluate papers dealing with safety and security threats to civil engineering works enabled by BIM and published in 2019–2020. In particular, safety and security aspects are investigated according to three types of threats: 1. structural related issues; 2. exceptional events (e.g., atmospheric phenomena or fires); 3. external attacks or human errors (e.g. acts of terrorism or mistakes in maintenance operations). Furthermore, selected papers are classified based on the involved application domain and BIM dimension. Results show that greater attention is paid to the first and second kind of threat, while a few papers focus on the management of issues potentially caused by external attacks or human errors. The majority of the papers regards the sixth BIM dimension of different kind of buildings while infrastructures and working sites are less studied. Advantages and limitations for the BIM-based safety and security are discussed and serve as a basis for the proposal of future research directions.