A Semantic Approach for Automated Rule Compliance Checking in Construction Industry

Dongming Guo,Angela Daniela La Rosa,Erling Onstein

doi:10.1109/access.2021.3108226

Abstract

Automated Compliance Checking (ACC) of building/construction projects is one of the important applications in Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry, because it provides the checking processes and results of whether a building design complies with relevant laws, policies and regulations. Currently, Automated Compliance Checking still involves lots of manual operations, and massive time and cost consumption. Additionally, some sub-tasks of ACC have been researched, while few studies can automatically implement the whole ACC process. To solve related issues, we proposed a semantic approach to implement the whole ACC process in an automated way. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is used to extract rule terms and logic relationships among these terms from text regulatory documents. Rule terms are mapped to keywords (concepts or properties) in BIM data through term matching and semantic similarity analysis. After that, according to the mapped keywords in BIM and logic relationships among keywords, a corresponding SPARQL query is automatically generated. The query results can be non-compliance or compliance with rules based on the generated SPARQL query and requirements of stakeholders. The cases study proves that the proposed approach can provide a flexible and effective rule checking for BIM data. In addition, based on the proposed approach, we also further develop a semantic framework to implement automated rule compliance checking in construction industry.

Highlights

Automated Compliance Checking (ACC) of building/construction projects is necessary in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry to provide stakeholders with high-quality building design models that should comply with certain authorized rules
We introduced an automatic SPARQL generation approach in ref [29], in which a SPARQL query can be generated according to given query keywords
The proposed approach can implement the whole process of automated rule compliance checking in construction industry, including semi-automated information extraction from regulatory documents, automated term matching, automated SPARQL query generation, to reduce manual operations as much as possible

Summary

Introduction

Automated Compliance Checking (ACC) of building/construction projects is necessary in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry to provide stakeholders with high-quality building design models that should comply with certain authorized rules (such as international, national or local authorities’ laws, policies, and regulations). The proposal of the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), which is a neutral file format to facilitate building related information interoperability in AEC industry, promoted some research for building rule compliance checking on this model schema [4]. IFC documents of building models were generally viewed as inputs in building model preparation phase [4, 5]. For some semantic ACC applications, IFC documents were generally converted into Resource Description Framework (RDF) standard model in the building model preparation phase [6, 7]

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Conclusion