Knowledge-based regulation processing for site development

Abstract

Municipal site development regulations heavily influence the layout and design of building sites, but paper-based regulations are extremely inefficient for use in computer-aided design. This paper describes the conceptual design for SITE CODE, a knowledge-based model of a municipal site development code which was developed to study how regulations can be incorporated into systems for computer-aided site design. SITE CODE was developed from studies of site development regulations in Austin, Texas, San Diego, California, and Fairfax County, Virginia in the United States. The primary function of SITE CODE is to extract from the code all design requirements which are applicable to a particular development project. An organizational system for regulations has been developed to facilitate retrieval of design requirements based on: (1) the geographic district or region in which a regulation is applicable, (2) the time period during which a regulation is effective, and (3) the administrative or legal process (zoning, land subdivision, or site plan review) with which a regulation is associated. SITE CODE consists of a hybrid rule-based/object-oriented representation of site development regulations called the regulatory knowledge base. An object-oriented requirement knowledge base containing project-specific design information extracted from the regulations is created dynamically during a session.