Regulatory Knowledge Encoding Guidelines for Automated Compliance Audit of Building Engineering Design

The main challenges in automating the regulatory compliance checking of building engineering designs are the availability of computable representations of the building and the regulatory knowledge, as well as a system that can process and manage these representations effectively. The emergence of Building Information Modelling (BIM) and Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) at the start of the millennium has sparked useful research in the area of sharing building information effectively; but, challenges remain with producing a practical and manageable regulatory knowledge representation that can be processed effectively by a compliance checking system. Research is being conducted to develop a two-part regulatory knowledge representation which can be maintained independently by designers and regulators. One part is a set of compliant design procedures modelled as Business Process Diagrams (BPD) using an open standard Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). The other part is the associated regulatory constraints and rules encoded in a computable format suitable for execution with the BPMN. This paper reports on a set of guidelines developed for the purposes of encoding regulatory knowledge into the proposed computable representation. A verification method (C/VM2) prescribed by the New Zealand Building Code (NZBC) for the performance-based design of buildings related to fire safety has been selected as a case study to illustrate the encoding process. These guidelines are adaptable for encoding the entire NZBC.