Regulatory Knowledge Encoding Guidelines for Automated Compliance Audit of Building Engineering Design

Abstract

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 associated regulatory constraints and rules encoded in a computable format suitable for execution with the BPMN.This paper reports on a set of guidelines developed for the purposes of encoding regulatory knowledge into the proposed computable representation. A verification method (C/VM2) prescribed by the New Zealand Building Code (NZBC) for the performance-based design of buildings related to fire safety has been selected as a case study to illustrate the encoding process. These guidelines are adaptable for encoding the entire NZBC.

Process modeling for historical buildings restoration: an innovation in the management of cultural heritage

“…Therefore, found papers refer to the application of BPMN and BIM to different topics related to the construction industry. For instance, they deal with the development of a Process Mapping Procedure for planning BIM implementation on a 1 https://www.omg.org/ project [21], the development and validation of a holistic energy performance evaluation framework [22], the investigation of the requirements for BIM governance and the development of specifications for a cloud-based governance platform [23], the analysis of work process and information exchange in construction projects by focusing on the project owner [24], the definition of a Building Materials Reuse Workflow [25], the encoding of regulatory knowledge related to fire safety into a computable representation [26].…”

Semantic-Based Logic Representation and Reasoning for Automated Regulatory Compliance Checking

“…For the ontologybased effort by Yurchyshyna et al (2010;, the reasoning in their ontology-centered approach was implemented by matching Resource Description Framework (RDF)-represented design information with SPARQL queries-represented regulatory information, but a set of expert rules need to be manually defined through document annotations (i.e., annotations by content and external sources) to organize the SPARQL queries and enable reasoning, resulting in ad-hoc reasoning and lack of full automation. In the work by Beach et al (2013) and Dimyadi et al (2014), the mechanism of reasoning (e.g., sequence of rule execution) was not specified.…”

Computerizing Regulatory Knowledge for Building Engineering Design

“…This paper is an extension of the work presented at the joint ICCCBE and CIB W78 Conference in Orlando, Florida, USA, in July 2014 (Dimyadi et al, 2014).…”