Abstract
BackgroundMany research and development efforts have been made for automated compliance checking of building designs with regulatory requirements, but there is a lack of a non-proprietary and user-understandable representation of building regulations to support automated compliance checking in the construction domain that is experimentally tested for understandability and reading speed.MethodsThis research investigates a logic-based representation and tree-based visualization method for building regulatory requirements. The logic-based representation is based on classic logic programming language and can directly support automated compliance checking. The tree-based visualization is expected to improve the understandability and reading speed of the logic-based representation. Therefore, this method attempts to add to the limited research in non-proprietary and user-understandable representation of building regulations that is experimentally tested for understandability and reading speed. To test the understandability and reading speed of regulatory requirements using this representation and visualization method, a survey was conducted to compare different representations, namely, text, logic-based, and tree-based.ResultsStatistical analysis of the survey results shows that the proposed tree-based visualization method can significantly improve the understandability and reading speed of the logic-based regulatory requirement representation and this visualization method is at a comparable status with the original text representation of regulatory requirements in terms of understandability and reading speed.Conclusions(1) The investigated logic-based representation and tree-based visualization method for regulatory requirements serves as one potential non-proprietary and user-understandable representation of building regulations; (2) this research shows that computable representations of regulatory requirements can achieve understandability and reading speed that are comparable to the original text representation through tree-based visualization; and (3) this research reveals that the tree-based visualization of regulatory requirements improves the understandability and reading speed of regulatory requirements when such use is compared to the computable logic-based representation.
Highlights
Many research and development efforts have been made for automated compliance checking of building designs with regulatory requirements, but there is a lack of a non-proprietary and user-understandable representation of building regulations to support automated compliance checking in the construction domain that is experimentally tested for understandability and reading speed
Experimental setup To test the proposed tree-shaped visualization method in terms of the understandability of the regulatory requirements represented using it, a survey was sent to 300 people with various backgrounds randomly
For the complex regulatory requirement, the difference was not significant at any of the three confidence levels; (4) the text representation was significantly faster to read than the logic representation at all the three confidence levels; (5) the visual representation was significantly faster to read than the logic representation at all the three confidence levels; and (6) while the text representation had higher scores than the visual representation in terms of reading speed, the difference was only significant at the 90% confidence level, but not significant at either the 95% or the 99% confidence level
Summary
Many research and development efforts have been made for automated compliance checking of building designs with regulatory requirements, but there is a lack of a non-proprietary and user-understandable representation of building regulations to support automated compliance checking in the construction domain that is experimentally tested for understandability and reading speed. A number of efforts have been made to explore the automated compliance checking of building designs with various types of code requirements using various types of computable representations. Some commercial automated compliance checking systems were developed. Research efforts have been designated for the representation of regulatory requirements for automated compliance checking purposes. Compared to the methods used in commercial systems, these research efforts strive for a more flexible representation that potentially can be used to represent a variety of code requirements
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