Towards Automated Compliance Checking of Building Regulations: smartNorms4BIM

Abstract

This paper describes a preliminary approach towards automating the compliance checking of constructions with respect to building regulations. We describe a prototype that supports such automated checking by specifying regulations in terms of an ontology, and reasoning with the Building Information Models (BIM) of constructions. The first step in our approach is to translate regulations into a machine-readable format with the support of controlled natural language specifications of rules. Then, we propose a formal specification of the building regulations in OWL2, the de facto standard for ontology engineering on the web. We sub-sequently populate this ontology with data of real-world BIM specifications based on Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) in order to check their compliance with the formalized regulations. Finally, our prototype offers to the end-users a verification report in text and a graphical visualiser with the results of the compliance check. To explain how our prototype works and to demonstrate its applicability, we show some examples taken from a concrete use case.