Journals Information
Civil Engineering and Architecture Vol. 3(6), pp. 163 - 171
DOI: 10.13189/cea.2015.030601
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Understanding Computable Building Codes
Nawari. O. Nawari 1,*, Adel Alsaffar 2
1 School of Architecture, College of Design, Construction and Planning, University of Florida, USA
2 College of Architecture, Kuwait University, Kuwait
ABSTRACT
Building codes and regulatory standards are becoming increasingly complex with the acquisition of new knowledge in the design and construction domain. The necessity for computable representation of the building codes and regulations for automating the code checking process is becoming ever more critical. Within the framework of Building Information Modeling (BIM) work process, model checking against building regulations is generally needed to be an automatic or semi-automatic process. These checking mechanisms generally do not modify a building design, but rather evaluates a design on the basis of the configuration of objects, their relations and attributes. This paper presents a summary of the core existing methods for computerizing building codes and standards. It reviews main concepts for these methods including knowledge representation, reasoning procedures, and knowledge acquisition. Moreover, this study evaluates the capabilities of the reviewed methods in reference to their practical applications and applied limitations for modeling computable building codes and standards. Additionally, the paper proposes methods with practical flexibility of encoding building codes knowledge domain and at the same time possess transparent and verifiable syntax and sematic features. The suggested approaches rely on evidently identifying objective and subjective data of the regulatory text before formalizing building codes. The methodology realizes the limitations of the formalization systems by clearly identifying which components of the building codes and standards can be transformed into computable model and which parts can't be encoded and requires manual compliance checking.
KEYWORDS
Computable Building Code Representations, Building Information Modeling, BIM, Automated Code Checking
Cite This Paper in IEEE or APA Citation Styles
(a). IEEE Format:
[1] Nawari. O. Nawari , Adel Alsaffar , "Understanding Computable Building Codes," Civil Engineering and Architecture, Vol. 3, No. 6, pp. 163 - 171, 2015. DOI: 10.13189/cea.2015.030601.
(b). APA Format:
Nawari. O. Nawari , Adel Alsaffar (2015). Understanding Computable Building Codes. Civil Engineering and Architecture, 3(6), 163 - 171. DOI: 10.13189/cea.2015.030601.