Automated Compliance Checks for Construction, Renovation or Demolition Works

Project Information

ACCORD

Grant agreement ID: 101056973

DOI

10.3030/101056973

Project closed

EC signature date 13 May 2022

Start date 1 September 2022

End date 31 August 2025

Funded under

• Digital, Industry and Space

Total cost

€ 4 318 945,43

EU contribution

€ 3 825 657,00

Coordinated by

TEKNOLOGIAN TUTKIMUSKESKUS VTT OY
Finland

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - ACCORD (Automated Compliance Checks for Construction, Renovation or Demolition Works)

Reporting period: 2024-03-01 to 2025-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Building regulations, standards, and requirements are essential in designing and constructing safe, high-quality buildings. The official compliance process necessitates extensive documentation across multiple formats, such as documents, drawings, calculation sheets, models, and simulations. Better information exchange management and automatic code-compliance checking would reduce construction costs and improve built quality.

ACCORD aims to digitalise building permit and compliance processes using BIM and open standards to enhance design and construction quality, support climate-neutral buildings, and align with the EU Green Deal and New European Bauhaus. It focuses on human-centred, transparent, and cost-effective solutions for applicants and authorities. The project develops automated compliance checks across the building lifecycle. The solutions will be based on open and neutral data exchange standards. The project develops a semantic microservice framework based on microservices, allowing businesses to connect and develop solutions, resulting in a scalable, durable and flexible permitting ecosystem.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

ACCORD analysed the complex landscape of built environment compliance checking and permitting across Europe to ascertain the user requirements for future digitalization. The current building permit processes of the demonstration countries (Finland, Estonia, the UK, Germany and Spain) were modelled.

ACCORD developed a semantic framework for European building permit processes, regulations, data and tools. This framework will drive rule formalisation and integration of existing compliance tools as microservices. ACCORD elicited the technical requirements for developing and integrating micro-services into the ACCORD project.

ACCORD defined a cloud architecture and its components, which were developed and utilised in the project. The components will provide consistency, interoperability and reliability with national regulatory frameworks, processes and standards. The components were implemented and demonstrated across construction projects in various EU regulatory contexts.

ACCORD developed a methodology for developing machine-readable rules from selected country-specific building regulations. It includes a domain-specific rule language that ACCORD developed. Two approaches were used. The first is manual, using the RASE (Requirement, Applicability, Exception, Selection). The second is AI-assisted, applying natural language processing, which has produced an annotated CODE-ACCORD dataset comprising 864 finely curated sentences extracted from English and Finnish building regulations, focusing on self-contained rules expressed therein. The dataset is a significant asset in developing intelligent systems and tools that can contribute to automated regulatory compliance and efficiency in the construction industry. It can be used to apply various Machine Learning and Deep Learning related tasks, such as classification tasks.

ACCORD created an AEC Compliance Checking and Permitting Ontology (AEC3PO) to provide a set of formalised semantics to underpin this approach. ACCORD has also reviewed existing ontologies, rule languages, standards, and data models within the real estate and construction domain to determine their suitability for automated compliance checks.

ACCORD’s key exploitable results can be grouped into the following thematical groups: A) Methods and tools for formalising documents into machine-readable formats, B) Technical frameworks, standards and harmonised guidelines for software and platform development for the use-case of automated digital building permit process, C) Software components for building permitting and compliance checking, D) Guidelines and information requirements for BIM-based building permit process, and E) Datasets.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

ACCORD developed a regulation digitisation methodology, advancing the state of the art by integrating established methods (RASE) into a semantic domain-specific Building Compliance Rule Language (BRCL), defined by the AEC3PO ontology. Further innovations integrate this approach with an AI-assisted approach, applying natural language processing, to produce the first hybrid automated compliance checking methodology. This includes a dataset comprising 864 finely curated sentences extracted from English and Finnish building regulations, focusing on self-contained rules expressed therein. The dataset is a significant asset in fostering the development of intelligent systems and tools that can contribute to automated regulatory compliance and efficiency in the construction industry. It can be used to apply different Machine Learning and Deep Learning tasks, such as classification tasks.

The AEC3PO ontology is a key outcome of the project; it is the first publicly released, rigorously defined construction-focused ontology that models building codes, regulations, standards, compliance and permitting processes and compliance and permitting actors. The BCRL language itself delivers impact, having the potential to become an agreed format to represent machine-readable and executable construction regulations. Together with a rule format, this ontology allows the building of a new industry that interprets and converts building codes to machine-readable formats.

Another key impact is the innovative ACCORD framework, which enables the deployment of the regulation digitisation methodology. This provides a blueprint to guide how digital building permitting can be implemented. It also provides a toolbox of components and suggested integration strategies to enable regulatory authorities to deploy their own building permitting platforms suitable for their own jurisdictions and legal framework. This framework advances the state of the art by providing the first distributed digital building permitting framework that is underpinned by formalised semantics.

Further impact is assured by the demonstration of a variety of deployments of the ACCORD framework across five demonstrators, each utilising a different set of components from the framework, with different permitting processes and integration strategies.

The scientific impact is quantified by ACCORD’s academic papers published across the duration of the project. Additional papers are in preparation in the areas of the hybrid AI/manual formalisation process and end-to-end demonstration and validation of the ACCORD framework.

ACCORD’s rule formalisation process

The final ACCORD Cloud Architecture

ACCORD's transparent and resource-efficient process

ACCORD semantic framework