In April this year, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development issued a notice deciding to launch a three-year action to tackle the root causes of safety production in housing and municipal engineering. It requires building a digital supervision system for construction safety, fully implementing the electronic certificate and license system in the field of construction safety, and strengthening digital empowerment of construction sites. Gansu, Shandong, Guangdong and other regions have effectively promoted the construction of digital supervision systems for construction safety through pragmatic measures.

Promoting electronic certificates and licenses

Implementing the electronic certificate and license system is an important means of promoting the digital transformation of construction safety supervision and an effective measure to improve government service levels.

To promote the application of electronic certificates for construction hoisting machinery use registration certificates, the Housing and Urban-Rural Development Bureau of Yumen City, Gansu Province, recently issued the county's first electronic hoisting machinery use registration certificate to the teaching building construction project of the junior high school department of Dushanzi Township School, realizing the transformation of government services from "can be handled" to "handled well."

In the past, when handling business, hoisting machinery users needed to submit hoisting machinery use registration materials on site, and enterprises often had to "run back and forth" between engineering projects and handling agencies. To completely free enterprises from the dilemma of "carrying certificates everywhere," Yumen City has gradually relied on the electronic certificate management system to synchronously upload to the national engineering quality and safety supervision information platform for record numbering and code assignment, achieving full online processing from material declaration and submission, review, to electronic signature and certificate issuance.

Electronic certificates have the characteristics of being queryable, verifiable, and tamper-proof. The entire certificate issuance process is more transparent, and they are stored and carried electronically, eliminating the need to carry physical certificates. Due to these advantages, electronic certificates have become another measure to facilitate the public and benefit enterprises.

To enable enterprises and the public to handle affairs without leaving home, the Housing and Urban-Rural Development Bureau of Liaocheng City, Shandong Province, is currently carrying out "one-stop online processing" for construction hoisting machinery filing and actively promoting the digitalization of certificates and licenses. Staff of the Liaocheng Housing and Urban-Rural Development Bureau guided relevant enterprises online in handling tower crane property filing business, conducted a full-process online trial from initial business submission to the final generation of electronic certificates, and successfully issued electronic certificates. The full online processing of construction hoisting machinery filing/registration business, the implementation of electronic certificates, and the connection with provincial and national information platforms are of great significance for efficiently satisfying enterprises and the public and comprehensively improving the quality and effectiveness of "streamlining administration, delegating power, improving regulation, and upgrading services."

Regarding the issuance of electronic certificates for construction hoisting machinery filing certificates, Guangdong Province has put forward new requirements: for tower cranes that newly apply for use registration but have not installed safety monitoring systems and have not completed docking with the "Guangdong Province Construction Hoisting Machinery Management System" for real-time data upload, the municipal housing and urban-rural development bureau shall not issue the Construction Hoisting Machinery Use Registration Certificate. For those that have completed use registration but have not installed safety monitoring systems and have not completed docking with the "Guangdong Province Construction Hoisting Machinery Management System" for real-time data upload, the municipal housing and urban-rural development bureau shall not carry out the replacement and issuance of the national standardized electronic certificate for the Construction Hoisting Machinery Filing Certificate.

Improving supervision platforms

Building a digital supervision system requires relying on digital supervision platforms to improve the informatization and digitalization level of construction site management. Rizhao City, Shandong Province, has used digital means to build a smart construction site digital supervision platform with all-round perception and all-weather supervision, connecting relevant departments through "integrated online management," realizing the sharing of supervision data and business collaboration, improving the service capacity and level of e-government, and enhancing engineering quality supervision capacity. It has achieved full coverage of monitoring in key areas and key parts, externally meeting the supervision requirements of competent departments, and internally assisting management departments at all levels in viewing the operation of various site parts in real time through data terminals for remote supervision and decision-making.

Yangpu District, Shanghai, has applied information technologies such as IoT sensing and artificial intelligence to actively promote the intelligent transformation of construction site supervision. On the basis of the original deep foundation pit control platform, it has implemented functional upgrades, added remote monitoring, personnel management, large machinery management, and intelligent recognition modules, and built the Yangpu District construction site smart supervision platform. The supervision platform automatically summarizes and generates data dashboards every month, displays site conditions, and realizes unified visual monitoring and intelligent management of civil construction sites throughout the district, further improving the effectiveness of engineering safety production supervision. At the same time, relying on the smart supervision system for bidding, it has achieved a 100% smart supervision spot-check ratio for electronic construction bidding projects.

On the basis of vigorously promoting smart construction site development, Tongzhou District, Beijing, has used technologies such as the Internet of Things, big data, digital twins, and mobile internet to build the Tongzhou District construction site digital supervision platform and promote its application in construction sites throughout the district, creating three-dimensional visual management for key project construction in the city sub-center.

Beijing Tongzhou District has many key projects and construction projects spread over a wide area. Previously, the digital supervision systems of various construction sites had no unified interface standards, making it difficult to guarantee the effectiveness of digital supervision at construction sites. By building the construction site digital supervision platform, unified digital interface standards for construction sites have been achieved, improving the level of digital supervision at construction sites.

The construction site digital supervision platform integrates data on on-site personnel management, safety supervision, and on-site construction supervision at construction sites in Tongzhou District, and builds a two-level management system of government supervision and enterprise control for key projects in Beijing's city sub-center that is digital, visual, standardized, and intelligent, comprehensively and promptly grasping the construction conditions and safety situation of all construction sites in the district. The platform can provide safety situation awareness and supervision services for construction sites in the city sub-center. Through data processing, it provides various chart services such as environmental monitoring calendars, environmental change curves, and heat maps, assisting supervisors in fully grasping dynamic environmental data at construction sites.

Realizing safety early warning

To effectively prevent safety accidents, building a digital early warning system for construction safety is equally crucial.

As one of the first pilot demonstration projects for intelligent construction in Changsha City, Hunan Province, the Hengwei Yanghu Garden project department has built an integrated intelligent construction platform based on the comprehensive use of modern information technologies such as the smart construction cloud platform, BIM (Building Information Modeling) technology, the Internet of Things, and big data.

According to reports, the platform is equipped with a visual management system and AI (artificial intelligence) technology, achieving no blind spots in on-site monitoring through multiple cameras. The system automatically identifies and warns of unsafe behaviors, such as not wearing safety helmets or not fastening safety belts, and pushes warning information to managers' mobile phones in real time to ensure timely investigation and rectification of problems. It has formed closed-loop management from problem discovery to rectification, realizing the transformation from passive "supervision" to active "monitoring" and greatly improving management efficiency.

Wuhan City, Hubei Province, has built a "Safety Early Warning Management System" driven by BIM three-dimensional models for PDCA closed-loop control of safety risks. By building an "identification-warning-control" system, it explores a new model of safety and quality risk early warning management to ensure controllable construction safety risks.

The safety early warning management system is supported by IoT sensing devices and based on a BIM engine, realizing visualization of safety early warnings, dynamically and visually feeding back key information on safety and quality warnings, and solving pain points such as the lack of spatial attributes in information acquisition. Through this system, risk identification and evaluation are carried out based on a case library before construction, generating a BIM-based safety risk list to support on-site risk inspections. During construction, the system monitors in real time the axial force, displacement, and inclination data of high formwork supports and analyzes safety status, displaying them visually on the BIM model. In addition, on-site safety risk inspections can be carried out, and based on inspection results and automatic monitoring data analysis, the on-site safety status can be comprehensively determined.