Formalization of Building Codes and Regulations in Knowledge Graphs

Formalization of Building Codes and Regulations in Knowledge Graphs. Costa, G., Vakaj, E., Beach, T., Lavikka, R., Lefrançois, M., Zimmermann, A., Mecharnia, T., Alexiev, V., Dridi, A., Hettiarachchi, H., & Keberle, N. In Noardo, F. & Fauth, J., editors, Digital Building Permit Conference 2024, pages 142-146, Barcelona, Spain, April, 2024.

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The Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry is subject to many building codes and regulations that apply to the design and construction of buildings. These regulations often involve complex language and technical vocabulary that can give rise to different interpretations, depending on their context and purpose, and therefore a difficulty in their application. The introduction of Building Information Modelling (BIM), as well as authoring tools capable of creating and exporting 3D representations of buildings, is paving the way for compliance checking to become more automated and less dependent on interpretation. This should allow for better quality by reducing the time needed for checking and avoiding human errors. However, despite attempts to provide new BIM-based methods and approaches to achieve this goal in the past two decades, none of these methods have proven to be close to being a definitive solution. The basis for checking compliance against regulations using a BIM model is to have a description of the regulations in a computable form. In turn, this makes it necessary to define data requirements for models that guarantee that regulations can be checked consistently. Within this framework, several scenarios can be considered to address the problem. One is to consider the descriptive part of the regulation separate from the execution part, that is, compliance checking procedures. Currently, those in charge of writing the regulations typically publish them in plain text documents in PDF format. Therefore, the next evolutionary step is to manage construction regulations in a machine-readable way underpinned by semantics, thus, ensuring they can be interpretated precisely by the software used for checking buildings against them.

@InProceedings{DBP2024-buildingCodes,
  author       = {Gonçal Costa and Edlira Vakaj and Thomas Beach and Rita Lavikka and Maxime Lefrançois and Antoine Zimmermann and Thamer Mecharnia and Vladimir Alexiev and Amna Dridi and Hansi Hettiarachchi and Nataliya Keberle},
  title        = {Formalization of Building Codes and Regulations in Knowledge Graphs},
  booktitle    = {Digital Building Permit Conference 2024},
  year         = 2024,
  editor       = {Francesca Noardo and Judith Fauth},
  pages        = {142-146},
  month        = apr,
  address      = {Barcelona, Spain},
  url          = {https://zenodo.org/records/12760552},
  url_Slides   = {https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1UO8bH9LY_KprjZhrSHFV7QKq2d8r_fjF/edit},
  keywords     = {AECO, BIM, regulation checking, automated compliance checking},
  doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.12760552},
  abstract     = {The Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry is subject to many building codes and regulations that apply to the design and construction of buildings. These regulations often involve complex language and technical vocabulary that can give rise to different interpretations, depending on their context and purpose, and therefore a difficulty in their application. The introduction of Building Information Modelling (BIM), as well as authoring tools capable of creating and exporting 3D representations of buildings, is paving the way for compliance checking to become more automated and less dependent on interpretation. This should allow for better quality by reducing the time needed for checking and avoiding human errors. However, despite attempts to provide new BIM-based methods and approaches to achieve this goal in the past two decades, none of these methods have proven to be close to being a definitive solution. The basis for checking compliance against regulations using a BIM model is to have a description of the regulations in a computable form. In turn, this makes it necessary to define data requirements for models that guarantee that regulations can be checked consistently. Within this framework, several scenarios can be considered to address the problem. One is to consider the descriptive part of the regulation separate from the execution part, that is, compliance checking procedures. Currently, those in charge of writing the regulations typically publish them in plain text documents in PDF format. Therefore, the next evolutionary step is to manage construction regulations in a machine-readable way underpinned by semantics, thus, ensuring they can be interpretated precisely by the software used for checking buildings against them.},
}

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