Technical specifications to meet the requirements of an Automatic Code Compliance Checking tool and current developments in infrastructure construction

Abstract

Building Information Modeling has revolutionized the construction industry by, for example, contributing to the automation of different activities related to the design, planning, and construction of civil works. Tasks such as the review of construction-related codes and regulations, which today still require a great deal of human effort, have begun to be automated through the development of digital applications and tools, thus resulting in the BIM use case Automated Code Compliance Checking (ACCC). So far, however, the research and development around this topic have been focused mainly on the building area, leaving a gap for the infrastructure sector. With this article, the authors intend to contribute to closing this gap, by providing an overview of the current state of development of ACCC tools in infrastructure construction. This overview supports the identification of challenges and requirements for the development of such tools, which are also discussed in detail in the current work. Finally, the author's considerations regarding the formalization and structuring of the engineering knowledge and infrastructure data required for the development of ACCC tools, as well as its mapping in a graph database, which allows access to all the necessary and relevant information for the code checking process, are presented. The result of the research carried out is the detailed structuring of the regulations and their rules from infrastructure construction and the possible modeling implementation in a graph database. In practice, this should help the leading software manufacturers in cooperation with infrastructure engineers, to develop a full-fledged ACCC tool.