Rule capture of automated compliance checking of building requirements: a review

Abstract

In the architectural, engineering and construction industry, building design needs to be checked against regulations before it can be finalised and progress to the construction stage. The traditional manual compliance-checking process is error prone and time consuming. As a solution, automated compliance checking (ACC) was proposed. Rule capture is a crucial bottleneck of ACC. Despite many studies in this domain, no research has synthesised the themes and identified future research opportunities. This paper aims to fill this gap by conducting a systematic literature review and identifying challenges facing this field. The findings revealed that the rule capture process had attracted interest in the past years, and more semi-automated and automated methods have been proposed. The current representation development process lacks a methodological backdrop. The existing representations cannot represent ‘unknowns’ and ‘side effects’, lack the ability to deal with ambiguous rules and are typically restricted by the rule engine and/or target data model. The understanding of rules, representations and the relationships between them is insufficient. Further research is required to address these issues.