## 1 Introduction  
Design conflicts refer to the errors in which building components overlap with each other spatially when compiling various types of engineering drawings. Since engineering drawings are generally formed after compiling the designs by engineers of different professions, design conflicts between different system components are often common [1; 2]. Minor design conflicts often result in rework and increase the project costs. In severe cases, design changes may be required, resulting in cost overruns, delay in progress, and compromising the structural safety. As pointed out by previous studies, unresolved design conflicts will hugely impact on the project success [3]. In recent years, the emergence of BIM software has enabled the easy detection of design conflicts; conflict checking has become one of the important functions of BIM software. Since resolving design conflicts is critical to the success of a project, many countries have mandated all public projects to execute clash detection. In the United Kingdom, for example, the design team must perform clash detection once every week or every two weeks to ensure that the engineering design receives complete coordination and is free of conflicts, thereby reducing the probability of change orders [4]. However, the clash detection algorithms of most BIM software are simple; as long as two building components are spatially overlapping, in contact, or within a given distance, they will be identified as a conflict/clashand listed in the detection report. Therefore, even for small projects, the number of clashes detected using BIM software can be enormous [5; 6; 7]. As many studies discovered, 50% or more of the clashes detected from BIM software are found to be \"irrelevant clashes\"; that is, these conflicts will not have a substantial impact on the projects, or they can be directly resolved by site engineers during the construction phase [7]. However, the clash detection report of BIM software does not identify these irrelevant clashes. Ideally, every single clash in a detection report should be evaluated by engineers to decide whether the resolution is needed. This is an extremely time-consuming job. According to our interviews with senior project managers, many projects in Taiwan cannot afford the high incurred costs. Thus, their BIM managers merely selectively review a few clashes or even neglect the entire report. It is why many studies have pointed out that unless filtering those irrelevant clashes is automated, the clash detection report with an overwhelming number of clashes will become trivial and meaningless [6; 7; 8]. Scholars have proposed methods to resolve this issue from three aspects, namely: clash avoidance, clash detection improvement, and clash filtering [6; 7]. Clash avoidance begins with the modeling method with the emphasis on adopting collaboration or strengthened coordination to reduce the occurrence of clashes. Undoubtedly, this method will increase the burden on the design staff [7]. For those project participants without direct contractual relationships, collaboration is also difficult to implement [6; 9]. By contrast, other scholars consider that the algorithm to detect clashes in BIM software can be improved by increasing the accuracy of its detection, thereby reducing the number of irrelevant clashes [5]. However, as some studies pointed out, the refinement of the clash detection algorithm cannot effectively prevent irrelevant clashes caused by human errors from happening [7; 10]. Recent studies suggest that an alternative is to directly identify those irrelevant clashes and filter them out from the clash detection report generated by BIM software. This method is broadly divided into two approaches. One is to apply rules to identify the dependency relationship of conflicting/clashing components, thereby filtering out irrelevant clashes [7]. However, the constructing dependency relationships between components and query algorithms is often time-consuming and labor-intensive when acquiring and maintaining the rules. [PERSON] et al.