Title: BIM based Digital Building Permits – A framework for automated rule checking

Author:             
Özden Bayraktar

Supervisors:

Prof. Dr. Jakob von Heyl

Dipl. Ing. Holger Meier

Date:            
Winter semester 2022

Award:             
Best of 2022 by HFT Stuttgart

Construction projects often struggle with many hurdles, such as delays. Delays can emerge from all project stakeholders and third parties. Governmental and bureaucratic reasons are often emphasized in the literature to cause project delays. One of the most critical reasons from the government side causing project delay is the issuance of building permits. The building permit process (BPP) is often described in the literature as confusing, inefficient and open to errors.

In this study, an online questionnaire is conducted to understand the status quo in Baden-Württemberg (BW). Additionally, the applicable building code was studied to understand the extent of its convertibility into a machine-readable format. A data discovery and visualization tool, Qlik Sense, is used to analyze the building regulations and encoding due to its simplicity in usage, cloud-based application model and flexibility. Subsequently the initial coding has been prepared for the selected regulations, and the model framework has been created. The sample data has been processed via de Qlink Sense application, and the compliance check was executed. Through the coding prepared, the initial automated compliance checking has been achieved, and the control data have validated the correctness of the results.

The study has revealed the possibilities and challenges in automated compliance and checking for BW. The major challenge is transforming the regulations into computer interpretable versions and smoothly transitioning to an automated system.

The conducted research has provided the following contributions:

  • Elaboration on the building regulations to allow data analysis process for further usage and the delivery of an applicable method for data classification.
  • Discovery of the existing exceptions, links between the regulations, human interpretation requirements and no-defined terms.
  • Building Class determination of the projects as per the building regulation.
  • The machine-readable representation of the mentioned building regulations.
  • Creation of a simplified framework to facilitate the transition to an automated BPP.