The Construction (Design and Management) Regulations (CDM) and approved Code of Practice issued in response to EC Directive 92/57/EEC will require the co-ordinators of all construction projects to prepare a Health and Safety Plan. A Health and Safety File must also be maintained for use at any subsequent time. The Health and Safety Commission estimates the total cost of implementing these proposals to be of the order of £550 million, the major part of which will be attributed to the production of the Health and Safety Plan. The Health and Safety Plan must set out arrangements for the construction project, taking into account the risks to health and safety, and must include arrangements for monitoring compliance by all persons. The Health and Safety File must contain information which relates to the structure "as built", and must be available to all future occupiers and contractors carrying out work on the structure.

This research builds upon the Safety Advisor for the Demolition project (SADI), and investigates the use of an intelligent authoring environment in which the Health and Safety Plan may be created, and in which the Health and Safety File may be stored and subsequently maintained. The investigation will also examine the codification of reasoning about multimedia information objects, the aim being to incorporate multimedia information both in the user interface, and within the safety documents and files themselves.

This paper describes the use of multimedia decision support tools together with distributed information systems in the dissemination and implementation of legislative requirements in the construction industry. The present rapid growth in the provision and access of information over wide area networks, combined with difficulties of storing and updating large multimedia information databases, has directed research activity toward the use of distributed information systems as effective vehicles for knowledge transfer and decision support. An advantage of this approach is that computing resources are more efficiently shared, and that information databases are managed and updated by those most suited to the task (the information providers themselves). One of the main difficulties addressed is the integration of intelligent systems technologies within these large distributed environments.

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