AI-Enabled Bio-Safety Assessment Tool for Sustainable Building Design in Pandemic Conditions.

At this time not only is there a global pandemic for the novel coronavirus COVID-19, at time of writing this application there is the 11th outbreak of Ebola being fought in Africa, Europe is recovering from a 3-year outbreak of measles and a peak in West Nile fever across Turkey and eastern Europe. World Health Organisation has said of COVID-19, "this virus may never go away". Revise Sociology reports that we spend 92% of our time indoors and 50% of our time in the workplace therefore we need to start to design our buildings with the threat of epidemics in mind.

In 2018 the value of construction new work in Great Britain continued to rise, reaching its highest level on record at over £133bn and as at 2018, the capital value or commercial property in the UK amounted to £951bn. Globally this is a £8trn per annum industry: the lack of occupation and confidence in returning to work has effects both the future investment in buildings and the current and future incomes from these properties.

The Royal Academy of Engineering stated recently, "We have to link our work to our health and these are challenges that can be achieved fast only through artificial intelligence."

The COVID-19 experience during 2020 has revealed a class of risk that, while continuously present, has been overlooked until now. Just as structures where many people congregate potentially expose their occupants to fire risk, air quality risk, water safety risk, etc., it is now clear that any large, enclosed structure may pose a bio-safety risk to its occupants under pandemic conditions.

There is currently no solution to assessing these risks and the complex interaction of epidemic modelling, facility engineering and human movement, means only AI can do this. Within a building or facility primarily focuses on the comfort of occupants although does use air quality and people density as a direct measure of success. Solutions driven by this modelling must also be attested against the RIBA sustainable outcomes for Good Health and Wellbeing. This is the perfect use case for Decision Intelligence - human decision-making with AI.

To protect these assets from financial losses, and their occupants from harm, professional disciplines have been established that:

\*Specify design "codes" to which buildings must conform to assure safe operation,

\*Provide sophisticated analysis tools and techniques while the structure is still in the design phase to assess risks and identify mitigating measures, and

\*Provide capabilities to assess existing buildings against the requirements of the code.

**Data Innovation.AI** is leading the establishment of a new professional discipline serving the architectural, engineering and design sector, and dedicated to assuring that structures fulfilling the above requirements for bio-safety of major structures during pandemic conditions, and is developing methodologies with supporting software-as-a-service tools to achieve this.