Towards French Smart Building Code: Compliance Checking Based on Semantic Rules
This addresses the need for efficient automated compliance checking in the construction industry, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing methods like model charts and formal rules.
The paper tackles the problem of automating compliance checking of building regulations against Building Information Models (BIM), which is currently a manual and time-consuming task for architects and engineers, by proposing an approach using semantic rules to translate regulations into queries, demonstrating its usefulness through several use cases.
Manually checking models for compliance against building regulation is a time-consuming task for architects and construction engineers. There is thus a need for algorithms that process information from construction projects and report non-compliant elements. Still automated code-compliance checking raises several obstacles. Building regulations are usually published as human readable texts and their content is often ambiguous or incomplete. Also, the vocabulary used for expressing such regulations is very different from the vocabularies used to express Building Information Models (BIM). Furthermore, the high level of details associated to BIM-contained geometries induces complex calculations. Finally, the level of complexity of the IFC standard also hinders the automation of IFC processing tasks. Model chart, formal rules and pre-processors approach allows translating construction regulations into semantic queries. We further demonstrate the usefulness of this approach through several use cases. We argue our approach is a step forward in bridging the gap between regulation texts and automated checking algorithms. Finally with the recent building ontology BOT recommended by the W3C Linked Building Data Community Group, we identify perspectives for standardizing and extending our approach.