BIM and the future of regulatory compliance
Automating the verification and validation of requirements for compliance with regulations such as planning, Building Regulations, and BREEAM is one of the expected benefits BIM would provide to the AEC industry and would also support the construction industry’s goal of delivering projects 50% faster by 2025. A two-year study to automate the task of checking a building’s compliance with regulations was completed in 2014.
The RegBIM project, funded by the Technology Strategy Board and involving seven partners, has created a software application that links to a BIM model and identifies compliance with specific regulations. A set of rules is required to define requirements, applicability, selection, and the exception methodology to be checked, as well as to highlight key information.
The rules are based on specific structures to allow values to be imported, and these are verified using the IFC file format. Two of the project’s key findings are:
- Future regulatory requirements in the UK will be written in a way that allows both machine and human readability, avoiding ambiguity.
- The IFC format schema does not carry the specific property data set required to meet regulatory needs in the UK.
The need to quickly determine the density of a proposed scheme and demonstrate compliance with local plan requirements is one of the basic planning pillars in the design of large mixed-use projects. This is easily accomplished by creating a set of properties applied to each conceptual block that contain information related to the property type: number of habitable rooms, floor areas, planning use classes, etc. This information can be extracted along with simple formulas to calculate density results, and any changes to the scheme are instantly recalculated to provide the latest figures. As the scheme progresses, the conceptual blocks are interchanged for model construction, which maintain detailed spatial data that is accumulated and contributes to the overall property set. Level changes to individual spaces are allowed to contribute to the total calculation.
The industry is developing product data models for BIM objects as nodes within a BIM model. On the other hand, there is also a requirement to establish the necessary BIM data as nodes within models, neighborhoods, towns, cities, regions, etc. The RegBIM project demonstrated the concept of regulatory checks and identified a lack of consistent data standards available to the industry.
“Begin with the end in mind” is one of the key elements of BIM Level 2 identified in the UK standard PAS 1192-2, as well as a deeper understanding of information identification. The method has been applied to engage owners and asset managers to identify their needs. This also applies to the planning and construction of regulatory requirements and to conduct BIM, CPA, and BRE working group meetings on construction products. A tool has been provided to assist in the process of delivering standard BIM data through BRE, but authorities need to identify and deliver the regulated definitions and data requirements to do this. The tools can be delivered, along with process validation techniques, to improve the process for the benefit of all.
Source: http://planningandbuildingcontroltoday.co.uk/bim/bim-future-regulation-compliance/24889/