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.
