A Framework for Automated Code Compliance of Residential Buildings: A Case Study on the Province of Alberta
Creators: Badreddine, Anas
Publisher: name: University of Alberta Library
Year: 2023

<p>Digitalization of the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry has progressed significantly in the past decade. These advancements have been influenced by emerging technologies and encouraged by the Building Information Modelling (BIM) practices. The goal of shifting to a digitalized industry is to minimize errors in various project phases and the resulting delays and costs. Project planning and design is one of the most important phases of any construction project, with a significant effect on the quality of the final product. Therefore, digitalization and all efforts placed to support this phase pay dividends for project success.<br>
Building codes and standards must be followed in a project’s planning and design phase, since they outline what makes a system or structure safe for use. They are composed of numerous clauses written by subject matter experts, and are used by designers, contractors, and safety code officers to ensure that permitted work complies with safety standards. The current manual code compliance checking practices in construction tend to be time-consuming, prone to errors, and unproductive. Adhering to codes and standards by following where and when they apply usually creates confusion for owners, professionals, and Authorities Having Jurisdiction (AHJ). Designers must understand which clauses of the building code their structures must abide by. On the other hand, plan examiners and reviewers must rely on experience to judge the compliance of proposed structures in the permit application’s drawings. Additional complexity stems from the frequent updates that codes and standards undergo, rendering the manual code compliance process more challenging.<br>
The automation of building compliance with the applicable codes is a path into the digitalization of the AEC sector. This is a path that has been of growing interest to researchers and was inspired by the theory of clash detection and reduction between construction trades. Today, technological advancements offer the opportunity for Automated Code Compliance (ACC) in the early stages of project planning and design. This research presents a framework for ACC that employs Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) in a user-friendly environment to transform the code compliance from a manual process to an automated process. The methodology followed in this work enables the translation of the linguistic content of building codes and standards into machine-interpretable data. Consequently, extracted data can be used to develop logical tests on the information received from BIM models to identify the compliance of elements with the codes and standards, ultimately generating an automated report for users. This framework was tested on four residential house projects to evaluate its effectiveness and accuracy in automating the code compliance checking process. The tests proved that the user-centered interface could be adopted by professionals and AHJ to expedite project planning and design and to reinforce the permitting process.</p>