The Case for Delivering the Infrastructure for Digital Building Regulations

Published

May 19, 2014

Author(s)

Mark E. Palmer, James H. Garrett

Abstract

The building industry uses numerous engineering standards, building codes, specifications and regulations and a diverse set of industry vocabularies to describe, assess, and deliver constructed facilities. As part of the expanding use of building information modeling and integrated project delivery, building and regulatory stakeholders and their software suppliers are recognizing the value of combining building models with rule sets for multi-domain analyses, optimization, and assessing regulatory compliance. Having validated representations of building regulations for use by model checking applications will enable new capabilities for optimizing designs and for automating and streamlining the regulations compliance assessment process. There are now a number of very important initiatives being undertaken to develop standardized representational approaches for more building regulations so that they can be applied and checked automatically against building information models and standardized data exchange representations, such as the Industry Foundation Classes (IFCs). With this editorial, we provide recommendations for broadening the support of these initiatives, which are much needed and timely, and present a set of issues derived from research and prototyping that are related to the development and industry deployment of formal computable representations of building regulations.

Citation

Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering

Pub Type

Journals

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Keywords

building information modeling, building regulations, compliance assessment, Industry Foundation Classes (IFCs), model checker

Citation

Palmer, M. and Garrett, J. (2014), The Case for Delivering the Infrastructure for Digital Building Regulations, Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=912456 (Accessed April 23, 2024)