Automated Building Code Compliance Checking - Where is it at? (original) (raw)
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Building projects in Australia are traditionally checked manually against the Building Code of Australia (BCA) – a set of continuously changing and increasingly complex regulations. Manual certification processes are error-prone and time-consuming tasks (J. Jeong & G. Lee 2010; Tan et al. 2010). Technical developments in Building Information Modelling (BIM) provide the potential for a new-generation of software tools to assist the checking of compliance with building codes. These should improve efficiency and accuracy for designers as well as for governing bodies. This paper reviews the requirements of certification processes for commercial buildings with specific emphasis on fire codes. We describe the selection of building class, the assessment of fire rating and the interpretation of fire codes. The characteristics of these requirements are explored, and ways for BIMenabled checking systems to access these data are identified.
Automated compliance checking using building information models
Building designs in the UK are currently checked manually against a frequently changing and increasingly complex set of building regulations. This is a major task for both designers and enforcers, often leading to ambiguity, inconsistency in assessments and delays in the overall construction process. Technical developments in Building Information Modelling (BIM) offer the potential for a new generation of software tools that can automate the checking of compliance with building codes, thus improving the efficiency of building design and procurement. To attain these efficiencies designers must change their working practices and move away from the definition of a building in multiple and disparate documents to a single coherent building model from which the documentation is generated. Theoretically, this building model could contain sufficient information to respond to interrogation at the level of building code compliance, though in practice only a percentage of the required informat...
The main challenges in automating the regulatory compliance checking of building engineering designs are the availability of computable representations of the building and the regulatory knowledge, as well as a system that can process and manage these representations effectively. The emergence of Building Information Modelling (BIM) and Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) at the start of the millennium has sparked useful research in the area of sharing building information effectively, but challenges remain with producing a practical and manageable regulatory knowledge representation that can be processed effectively by a compliance checking system. Research is being conducted to develop a two-part regulatory knowledge representation, which can be maintained independently by designers and regulators. One part is a set of compliant design procedures modelled as Business Process Diagrams (BPD) using an open standard Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), and the other is the associ...
2020
The implementation of Building Information Modelling (BIM) in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry has significantly amplified the responsibility of designers in creating reliable and accurate BIM models. Fundamentally, the BIM models must comply with the fire safety regulations to provide minimum protection for building occupants and property. Since fire safety regulations are known to be complex and rigid, the manual compliance checking process could lead to inaccuracies, especially in a BIM-based environment. Hence, this study developed an automated BIM-based fire regulations compliance checking system for Malaysian's AEC industry. In order to establish the rules and BIM properties necessary for fire regulations compliance checking process, 256 clauses from Parts VII and VIII of Selangor Uniform Building (Amendment) (No. 2) By-Laws 2012 were selected to create a BIM model using Revit® based on two-dimensional drawings of a completed 17-storey institutional building. Three investigations were conducted to structure the representation of the rules and BIM properties. First, the fire safety clauses were formalised through a classification technique, semantic markup requirement, applicability, selection, exception (RASE) methodology, and interviewing two fire engineers and a representative from the Fire and Rescue Department Malaysia (JBPM). Secondly, the BIM properties consisting of 54 families and their respective parameters in Revit® were identified for the compliance checking process. Lastly, pseudocodes and architecture of the automated system were developed to establish the relationship between the formalised clauses and BIM properties. Dynamo® scripts were used to develop a prototype of an automated fire regulations compliance checking system which could automatically check for fire doors and staircases in Revit®. The representative from JBPM, three fire engineers and architect validated the proposed architecture while the prototype was validated by three architects, two structural engineers, one mechanical engineer, and two civil engineers. This study contributed to a semi-automated rule translation process which combined existing approaches in this field of study. The classification technique and semantic markup RASE methodology were refined in this research by developing flowcharts to provide specific guidelines in formalising the clauses. The semi-automated rule translation process encouraged the participation of relevant fire safety experts and provided more accessibility for designers compared to existing studies. This study also offered more practicality for designers to employ the system by utilising native BIM model data representation. High mean scores ranging from 4.00 to 4.96 were obtained for the validation process, which affirmed the feasibility of an automated BIM-based fire regulations compliance checking system to assist designers in the Malaysian AEC industry.
Computerising the New Zealand Building Code for automated compliance audit
2020
The reader should verify the applicability of the information to particular situations and check the references prior to any reliance thereupon. Since the information contained in the proceedings is multidisciplinary, international and professional in nature, the reader is urged to consult with an appropriate licensed professional prior to taking any action or making any interpretation that is within the realm of a licensed professional practice.
2016
Every architectural and building engineering design in the AEC/FM (Architectural, Engineering, Construction, and Facility Management) domain is subject to conformance with a diverse range of statutory requirements and standards before the official consent for construction may be granted by the relevant authority. There is an enormous amount of information to process and share among the stakeholders for this to occur. Historically, building information has been exchanged in the domain using paper-based drawings and written specifications. Auditing a building design for compliance, for example, has been a manual undertaking against a voluminous corpus of paperbased legal texts that are written in natural language intended for human interpretation. This paper-based practice is resource intensive, inefficient, and error-prone, which has sometimes resulted in costly remediations of problem buildings and even loss of lives. It is also a factor for declining productivity in the domain. The...
Computerizing Regulatory Knowledge for Building Engineering Design
Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering, 2016
Two common challenges in the computer-aided compliance audit of building engineering designs are being addressed in the current research. The first is to ensure that any form of computable representation is practical and relatively easy to use and maintain. The second is to ensure that performance-based regulatory compliance criteria, which are often qualitative in nature, are adequately addressed and correctly represented. This research proposes a method of automating manual compliant design procedures using an open standard executable workflow representation that can be specified and maintained relatively easily by a design engineer. This executable workflow is referred to as the Compliant Design Procedure (CDP) and can be described graphically using a subset of the open standard Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). When executed in a computing environment, a CDP can guide the compliance audit process by checking a given design represented in a model view or subset of the BIM model, referred to as the Building Compliance Model (BCM), against the criteria in a digital building code, referred to as the Regulatory Knowledge Model (RKM), which is developed specifically for this purpose. This paper describes the process of modelling and encoding BCM, CDP and RKM, which are independent input components of the proposed compliance audit system framework. Supplementary human input and the ability to exchange input and output data with external simulation tools to solve some of the more complex qualitative criteria are important features of the framework.
Automated Code Compliance Checking Model for Fire Egress Codes
Proceedings of eCAADe 2012 - Digital Physicality | Physical digitality
Architecture today has come to its most complex form. There are lots of criteria such as fire safety, structure, sustainability etc… which must be controlled by the designers. To improve the performance and accessibility of buildings, governing bodies publish different codes for each of the different criteria. Buildings must comply with these codes to get a permit for construction. The checking of the buildings according the codes is done manually by code officials. This process is time consuming, high in cost and prone to errors. To remedy this problem by using the tools like BIM and AI, systems that can automatically check the code compliance of projects are being developed. In this paper we provide an overview of the structures and capabilities of these systems and present the automated code compliance checking system that we develop for checking building models against some parts of the Turkish Fire Codes.
Computerization of building regulations
Since the advent of computers, the construction industry has sponsored considerable research and development for computerizing building regulations. Unfortunately, few of these developments have resulted in computer applications that are currently available in wide use in practice. In the meanwhile, computer users are seeking and demanding automated solutions to assist in comprehending building regulations and in facilitating access to existing building regulations, codes and standards and more sophisticated users are interested in the integration of code information with computer-aided design systems. Emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, knowledge-based expert systems, objectoriented programming, hypertext, and relational databases, are providing new environments, as well as new concepts, for computerized building regulations. These new technologies are a possibility for developing tools for fast, intelligent, and comprehensive access to building regulations. Most recently,. expert systems have received considerable favour for building regulation access, but they may not provide a full solution in the intermediate future. Alternatively, hypertext provides the potential for quick retrieval of text-based infomation and may address other needs in the short term. Decision Tables provide the most comprehensive solution but are extremely expensive to develop and maintain. This paper presents a bibliography of international activities in the development of computerized building regulations. It locates centres of excellence-for research and development, identifies key players in these activities, and abstracts the research projects and products. The paper also details the many Canadian activities for computerizing building regulations and specifically outlines the work in producing a hypertext version of the National Building Code of Canada and an automated check list for code compliance.
Querying a Regulatory Model for Compliant Building Design Audit
The ingredients for an effective automated audit of a building design include a BIM model containing the design information, an electronic regulatory knowledge model, and a practical method of processing these computerised representations. There have been numerous approaches to computeraided compliance audit in the AEC/FM domain over the last four decades, but none has yet evolved into a practical solution. One reason is that they have all been isolated attempts that lack any form of standardisation. The current research project therefore focuses on using an open standard regulatory knowledge and BIM representations in conjunction with open standard executable compliant design workflows to automate the compliance audit process. This paper provides an overview of different approaches to access information from a regulatory model representation. The paper then describes the use of a purpose-built high-level domain specific query language to extract regulatory information as part of the effort to automate manual design procedures for compliance audit.