Model-Based Checklist Generation for Façade Safety Inspection Guidance

Accidents caused by falling debris from buildings keep happening in densely populated cities in the US, even in cities with mandatory façade safety inspection programs (e.g., NYC, Boston, and Chicago). One of the major challenges in the current façade safety inspection program is the lack of systematic guidance for inspectors to comprehensively check façade conditions on-site. To address this challenge, the authors envisioned an approach to generate a list of applicable defect types for any given building façade. Building information modeling (BIM) has been leveraged to decompose facades into components and link them to applicable defects. The developed mechanism has been tested to generate checklists for 12 common façade components on real facades. The results of this work can be considered by inspection companies and city agencies for approving/rejecting inspection findings to improve their work processes for comprehensive inspections.