Johannes Dimyadi

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), and the other 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. BACKGROUND

Sharing Building Information using the IFC Data Model for FDS Fire Simulation

This paper describes part of a research project that looks into the potential and challenge of using the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) open standard building information model in fire engineering design. In particular the paper describes work undertaken to share building geometry and other information with the Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) fire simulation model. A commercially available building information modeling (BIM) authoring application has been used to create building geometries and export IFC data files. A web-based conversion tool has been created to generate FDS input data given the output from a dedicated fire engineering IFC parser tool. The capabilities and outcome of data sharing process is illustrated in this paper using a simple test case building.

Computerizing Regulatory Knowledge for Building Engineering Design

AbstractTwo common challenges in the computer-aided compliance audit of building engineering designs are addressed in the current research. The first is to ensure that any form of computable representation is practical and relatively easy to use and maintain. The second is to ensure that performance-based regulatory compliance criteria, which are often qualitative in nature, are adequately addressed and correctly represented. This research proposes a method of automating manual compliant design procedures using an open standard executable workflow representation that can be specified and maintained relatively easily by a design engineer. This executable workflow is referred to as the compliant design procedure (CDP) and can be described graphically. When executed in a computing environment, a CDP can guide the compliance audit process by checking a given design represented in a model view or subset of the building information model (BIM), referred to as the building compliance model (BCM), against the cri...

Evaluating LegalDocML and LegalRuleML as a Standard for Sharing Normative Information in the AEC/FM Domain

Legal text is typically conveyed in natural language and thus not readily suitable for computer processing. Numerous work-around approaches have been proposed by researchers in the Architecture, Engineering, Construction and Facilities Management (AEC/FM) domain over the last four decades to create computable representations of normative data that can be used to automate some of the processes in the domain. The transition from human-readable text to a structured representation can occur in many possible ways, e.g. through Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, manual annotations, or through direct coding. In all cases, however, the human-readable document at the source remains the sole point of reference. Ideally, however, one digital structured representation should also be available and recognised as the single digital point of reference.Research in the AEC/FM domain has shown that automated compliant building design processes would benefit from a single standardised and manageable digital representation of normative data. Recent efforts in the legal domain have shown promising developments in legal mark-up languages such as LegalDocML and LegalRuleML as emerging open standards for legal knowledge interchange. In this article, we explore the potential of adapting these emerging standards to accommodate specific requirements of the AEC/FM domain.

Computer-aided Compliance Audit to Support Performance-based Fire Engineering Design

Computer-aided compliance auditing aims to provide an automated system to assess engineering designs against specified regulatory representations. Previous research has largely focused on prescriptive regulatory rules, which are relatively easier to audit than those pertaining to performance-based codes with qualitative criteria. There have been a few prototype implementations of rule-based compliance auditing systems that tend to represent regulatory knowledge as complex rule sets integrated into the system. The drawback of this approach is inflexibility, relatively high costs and dependency on the system programmer to modify built-in rules in response to on-going regulatory amendments. The current research looks at representing regulatory knowledge as a library of compliant design procedures (CDP) and the associated regulatory rules, which are treated as external input components to the system. This would allow them to be managed and maintained independently by designers and regulators as appropriate experts in their respective fields. This paper reports on the development of a computable regulatory knowledge model (RKM) that can be used in conjunction with a CDP to audit an object-based building information model (BIM) automatically. CDPs can be described graphically as workflows in the open standard Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), which can be executed to automate the compliance audit process. A RKM representing the fire engineering performance-based verification method prescribed by the New Zealand Building Code is proposed for use by a set of CDP workflows to automatically audit the design for compliance. The potential of interfacing with simulation tools to provide some of the required input parameters is discussed.

The Critical Role of Accessible Data for BIM-Based Automated Rule Checking Systems

This paper proposes a concept of an accessible BIM database that supports integration with geometry enabling simplified and efficient queries of the IFC-based building model. The simplified schema, BIMRL, is shown to be significantly effective for the purpose of an implementation of an automated BIM-based rule checking system. The schema has been shown to successfully work in both traditional RDBMS and the NoSQL graph database. It complements a missing piece in the current research of automated rule checking, which mostly focuses on the formulation and representation of computable rules involving logic, checking algorithm, and parameterization. Even though these present approaches have largely assumed that data is available and easily accessible from a building model, this assumption is typically infeasible in a real-world implementation. Building rules require not only base data explicitly available in the model but also higher level semantic concepts that typically involve multiple relationships and spatial operations, which cannot be captured explicitly in the model. Without addressing this issue, a rule checking system will severely underperform and will be filled with opaque algorithms that act as black-boxes.

In Search of Open and Practical Language-Driven BIM-Based Automated Rule Checking Systems

Significant progress has been made towards BIM-based automated rule-checking systems. There are multiple approaches that show varying potentials as crucial components for open and practical rule checking systems. However, in the current state, we are not yet quite there as they are still several barriers that prevent the needed shift from proof-of-concept to the real-world implementation. This paper reviews various language-based rule checking systems that have been proposed and assesses their potentials and gaps that need to be overcome for them to become practical. It introduces metrics of eleven criteria to analyze various approaches to assess their readiness for the real-world implementations. The criteria cover a wide range of aspects including language expressiveness, ease of use to define a rule, openness, level of maturity, and performance. These criteria help to identify gaps that currently exist that need to be overcome to allow a leap from a proof-of-concept to the real-world implementation. From the assessment, it is obvious that no one single approach is currently capable of covering the entire spectrum of requirements for automated rule-checking systems. The assessment also shows that the possibilities of combining two or more approaches may accelerate the realization of an open and practical language-driven automated rule checking system.

Modularized BIM Data Validation Framework Integrating Visual Programming Language with LegalRuleML

A building design must satisfy diverse requirements including building codes, owner’s specifications, design guidelines, and project requirements. In addition, there is a growing need for an automated design evaluation process involving intelligent checking and reporting capabilities that addresses the inefficiency and error-prone nature of the current manual checking practice. To leverage the automated rule checking procedure, we need to overcome two existing key challenges, which are the inherent complexity of rules and the impracticability of checking methods. To address these challenges, this research proposes a node-based visual language approach integrated with the emerging open standard LegalRuleML, which allows the flexibility in defining and executing design rules in a machine-readable and implementable format. The approach effectively facilitates the entire rule-checking process including the rule interpretation from natural language-based requirements to machine-readable forms, rule categorization, rule parameterization, and checking execution with a BIM model. The LegalRuleML-based visual programming language approach for rule checking will help automatically and iteratively evaluate the quality and defects of information conveyed in a given building model interactively as an essential part of design process.

Using IFC to Support Enclosure Fire Dynamics Simulation

One objective of the performance-based design (PBD) of fire safety in buildings is to ensure occupants have an adequate time to escape the effects of the fire unharmed. A commonly accepted threshold of the safe evacuation time is the time it takes for the fire to compromise the escape routes rendering them untenable. This is a complex computational problem that often requires simulations to solve given the geometry of the building, plausible fire scenarios, thermo-physical properties of building materials and furnishing, as well as the environmental conditions.

Maintainable process model driven online legal expert systems

Legal expert systems are computer applications that can mimic the consultation process of a legal expert to provide advice specific to a given scenario. The core of these systems is the experts’ knowledge captured in a sophisticated and often complex logic or rule base. Such complex systems rely on both knowledge engineers or system programmers and domain experts to maintain and update in response to changes in law or circumstances. This paper describes a pragmatic approach using process modelling techniques that enables a complex legal expert system to be maintained and updated dynamically by a domain expert such as a legal practitioner with little computing knowledge. The approach is illustrated using a case study on the design of an online expert system that allows a user to navigate through complex legal options in the domain of International Family Law.