Development of an object model for automated compliance checking

Building designs in countries such as the United Kingdom are currently checked manually against a frequently changing and increasingly complex set of building regulations. This is a major task for designers and those bodies that are charged with enforcing the building regulations. As a result this can often lead to ambiguity, inconsistency in assessments and delays in the overall construction process. As the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry moves from 2D Computer Aided Design (CAD) drawings to more semantically rich Building Information Models (BIMs), the development of automated compliance checking systems for building regulations becomes achievable. A format well suited to the automation of compliance checking is that based upon Industry Foundation Class (IFC). IFC has been accepted worldwide as an inter-operability standard. However, whether the IFC data format can fully support the specialised needs of the England and Wales Building Regulations is still debatable. In order to automate their checking, building regulations first need to be interpreted from human-readable free text rules into a set of computer-implementable rules. This paper reviews previous research into automated code compliance-checking, identifies the key issues for future development, and focuses on the analysis of the England and Wales Building Regulations that relate to fire safety for dwelling houses, to determine and subsequently optimize the potential for automated compliance checking. Subsequently, a Building Regulation-specific, semantically rich object model, appropriate for the requirements of automated compliance checking has been developed for England and Wales. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.