French Feasibility Study on« Digitalisation of Construction
Regulation »Context and objectives
Within the “digital transition in the building industry” a projectaiming to facilitate code checking for buildings

28/09/2015 - Auteur Nom 2

Overview of the diversity of regulatory
documents
A large and heterogeneous set of documents- Codes / Standards / Eurocodes / Calculation methods / Professional Rules /Guides- Different structures / different « customs » or habits -> different vocabularies

3A complex transformation process

Texts innaturallanguage

Building Digital Mockupin « OpenBIM » (IFC) format

Computer CodeFormal and BIM compliant

Automatic checking (Kroqi)

rapport derapport deconformité
Analysisconformité
report4

Example of the transformation process(fire safety)
Establishments wholly occupying the building with the lowest
floor of the highest storey located more than 8 meters from theaccess level of the fire brigade shall have a 1-hour fire-resistant
structure and fire-rated floors of the same degree.

5Tools developed …
• The Controlled Vocabulary: Cover the concerned regulatory domain and alignthe regulatory concepts with the entities of the OpenBIM (IFC) Creation of a dictionary based on the BIM standard (IFC) and containing 4000 Frenchterms
 Definition of maintenance/enrichment process to support the life cycle of such asemantic structure6

Tools developed …(cont.)• Integrated service to the French KROQI platform Use of advanced semantic & cloud technologies
 Transparent for the end users
 Independant from any proprietary solution

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Perspectives

Possible Collaborations•What are the various regulatory topics and which are the ones most adapted todigitalization and at what cost?

•

How to leverage the French initial work and bring the tools created at a higher stage?

-Status & Life cycle maintenance of a Japanese&French controlled vocabulary?
(proposal for an international standard?)-How to make use of a common checker or a shared repository of regulatory
constraints?

•Could we develop jointly a “Regulatory Editor” making use of the Controlled Vocabulary
and producing natively constraints written in a semi-formal way ?

•What could be the barriers to have such formalization approach for regulatory texts
that go beyond the scale of the building to the urban scale?

•How to deal with new regulations in order to make them “digital compliant” and easy tocheck against pre-identified requirements?
9Merci pour votre attention

Digitalization of Construction regulations
In France, since 2015, the digital technologies have been identified as the right tools to “improvethe effectiveness of those involved in all the steps from design to maintenance, including
development, manufacturing of equipment and products, installation, management andservicing, and also improve the quality of projects while significantly affecting the value chain”.
In such context, the ministry in charge of the construction sector has launched a National plancalled “Plan de Transition Numérique du Bâtiment” (PTNB - Plan for the digital transition inthe building industry). Within the scope of this plan, different initiatives have taken place
among which a feasibility study focusing on the digitalization of Construction regulations.
The challenges raised by this project are complex and of various natures. The methodology weadopted consisted into two major phases that are necessary to bridge the gap between the natural
language and the formal expression of rules that can be automatically processed against abuilding digital model.
1. The first phase consists in a simplification of the regulatory initial text into a so-called“semi-formal” representation. This step involves mainly regulatory domain experts whoare supported in the re-writing process by a toolbox containing methodological
guidelines and a text editor especially tuned for their specific needs. The specificconfiguration of the text editor consists in the definition of syntax highlighting andautocompletion based on a controlled vocabulary.
The controlled vocabulary is composed of French terms that are corresponding to thebuilding elements or properties used to describe digital models of buildings. The
backbone of the controlled vocabulary is ensured by the OpenBIM ontology (IFCOWL)
proposed by BuildingSmart. The French terms are the ones already available in the IFC
documentation, they could also come from other initiatives (like bSDD) or are extra
translations added in the frame of this project. The exercise for the domain experts is tosimplify the constraints expressed in natural language. To this end, the proposed
methodology relies on simple actions / recommendations aiming at disambiguating theway these constraints are formulated. The controlled vocabulary is the reference
vocabulary and provides as such a unique source of expressiveness. This centralized
approach avoids misunderstanding by using only controlled words that have a clear
definition and are also linked to the IFC.
2. The second step of this transformation brings the regulatory constraints from the semiformal to the formal stage. This step is performed by computer scientists familiar withBIM and with the semantic technologies. To benefit from all the functionalities and therichness of the semantic web technologies, the BIM files are translated from IFC into
RDF-graphs following the transformation validated by BuildingSmart in order also toensure a bijective correspondence between the two worlds (IFC & IFCOWL). Then tominimize the size of the data resulting from this transformation, several aspects are not
kept or are simplified (such as detailed geometry description). The resulting data are
stored in a semantic database (triple store).
This feasibility study demonstrated already the potential of the semantic web technologies tosupport the code checking needs. These technologies are mature enough to allow the formal
representation of regulation constraints and they are perfectly suited to bridge the gap between
the IFC vocabulary and the regulatory vocabulary. Of course, the well-defined framework mustbe established in order to confront an IFC file against a set of formal rules to check its
compliancy to a specific regulatory domain. It means that BIM implementation charters haveto be explicitly defined based on the same controlled vocabulary mentioned above and thesecharters must be closely followed by the persons in charge of exporting IFC files.
Based on such experience and taking into account the existing work made under the umbrellaof BuildingSMART, the vocabulary produced during this feasibility study is (also) aligned withbSDD. As such, this French framework is ready to be extended at the international level
following the IFD principles.
In that context the proposed items of collaboration are the following:
TopicsRegulatory topics
Controlled vocabulary
SemanticRegulatory
Checker
Semi-formal Regulatory
EditorFrom Building to City
scaleNew
methodsforconstruction regulations

Potential research area
What are the various regulatory topics and which are the ones mostadapted to digitalization and at what cost?
How to set up, enrich and maintain a Japanese/French controlled
vocabulary aligned with OpenBIM concepts?
How is it possible to share a common regulatory checker (same engine
and possible but not mandatory national rules)?
Based on the use of the controlled vocabulary mentioned above, is it
possible to develop a Regulatory Editor supporting the production of new
regulatory text, natively produced under a semi-formal controlled form
ensuring a direct interoperability with the BIM?
What could be the barriers to have such formalization approach forregulatory texts that go beyond the scale of the building?
How to deal with new regulations in order to make them “digital compliant”
and easy to check against pre-identified requirements?