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In many BIM projects, designers focus on the main structure — beams, slabs, columns — while smaller yet critical safety details often go missing. Railings, anchors, and edge protection are among the most neglected.
These elements are frequently added on-site without being modeled properly in Revit. That may sound minor, but the consequences aren’t: missing railing layouts can cause coordination issues, unsafe conditions, or costly rework when installation points aren’t accounted for in the model.
Why safety details often get skipped
Modeling repetitive safety components such as railings, anchors, and brackets is time-consuming and error-prone. Each post or connection must be placed and aligned manually, and if the host geometry (like a slab edge or beam) changes, the modeler must update everything again.
This repetitive process discourages modelers from including safety elements, even though they’re crucial for both site safety and design accuracy.
Automation brings safety back into the model. As BIM matures, the focus shifts from modeling the obvious — columns, beams, slabs — to capturing every detail that affects how a structure is built. Safety elements like railings and anchors are part of that evolution. Automating their placement ensures these details are never skipped or forgotten.
That’s exactly what Smart Connections, part of the Be.Smart Concrete collection by ARKANCE, makes possible in Revit - turning complex detailing into a controlled, rule-based process.
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Here’s how it works:
Define your families and rules: You specify which elements should be connected (for example, railing posts to slab edges) and under what conditions — spacing, offset, or orientation.
Automatic placement: Smart Connections scans the model and places connection elements (like posts, plates, bolts, or anchors) wherever they fit the rules.
Automatic updates: If the host geometry changes — e.g., the slab edge shifts or a beam moves — Smart Connections lets you update the railing layout with a single click
This combination of automation and adaptability saves enormous amounts of time, reduces repetitive work, and ensures consistency across the entire model.
Real-life example: Railings for a mezzanine platform
Take a common scenario: designing railings for a mezzanine platform.
Normally, adding dozens of railing posts in Revit is a slow, manual process. It’s no surprise that many teams skip that step and handle it later on-site.
With Smart Connections, you can instead:
Define rules such as: “place railing posts every 1.2 m along the slab edge”
Run the automation to insert all posts instantly, aligned and spaced correctly.
The result? A complete, accurate, and buildable model that includes safety details — done in a fraction of the time it would take manually.
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Why it matters
Integrating safety elements digitally brings measurable benefits across your workflow:
Built-in safety – Accurate railing and connection modeling ensures that safety considerations are designed, not improvised.
Consistency through automation – Every post, plate, and anchor follows identical logic, eliminating human error.
Significant time and cost savings – Tasks that used to take hours are reduced to minutes, improving both design efficiency and project timelines.
Improved communication – Including detailed safety elements helps all stakeholders - engineers, fabricators, and installers - understand exactly what will be built.
Building smarter — and safer
Building smarter - and safer Safety railings may look like small details, but they represent a larger truth: safety should never depend on manual effort or guesswork.
By automating connection placement in Revit, Smart Connections tool ensures every bracket, anchor, and post is modeled correctly and updated instantly as designs evolve. The result is not just faster modeling — it’s safer, smarter, and more reliable construction.
At ARKANCE, we believe that true digital transformation means more than working efficiently — it means working responsibly.
Through solutions like Smart Connections, we guide, equip, and enable designers and engineers to bring accuracy, safety, and confidence into every project. Because transformation takes a team — and we’re your people.
Curious about our
Concrete Collection for Revit?