Periodic Reporting for period 1 - CHEK (Change toolkit for digital building permit)
Reporting period: 2022-10-01 to 2024-03-31
Building permits ensure high quality in buildings and city development, realized through the compliance to city regulations.
Several attempts to digitalize building permit process are being developed within EU countries, either as top-down legal directives or as bottom-up local experiments, tests, and case studies. Some software for BIM analysis and model compliance checking has been also made available already (e.g. CYPE Urban, Verify3D, Solibri).
However, none of these attempts have achieved the uptake of a digital building permit (DBP) process that works in practice. A DBP process, New technologies, Open standards-based data exchange need to be developed, connected and aligned for success. This requires: (1) aligning available digital technologies to municipal process, enabling new methods and business models; (2) development of data Open standards, including Building Information Models (BIM), 3D city models and reciprocal integration (GeoBIM); (3) up/re-skilling officers and users; (4) improving, aligning and integrating technology; (5) realizing and demonstrating scalability
Objectives:
1. Develop and demonstrate novel DBP processes
2. Enforce data and service Interoperability
3. Fill the current knowledge gap and up/re-skill the construction value chain (including public officers) in line with the European Recommendation (EU) 2017/1805 on the professionalization of public procurement
4. Improve, develop and demonstrate in an operational environment a set of integrated software tools (from here on called “CHEK checking tools”), to (Semi-)Automatically check compliance to the CHEK regulations using integrated and interoperable (O2) 3D city models and BIMs as input, harnessing the potential of digitalization to accelerate processes with more than 50% and improve productivity consequently.
5. Demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of delivered solutions. Enable different ranges of municipalities throughout the whole European Union, to switch from analogue to digital workflows and methods for carrying out building permits procedures, by reusing the toolkit developed by CHEK.
Several attempts to digitalize building permit process are being developed within EU countries, either as top-down legal directives or as bottom-up local experiments, tests, and case studies. Some software for BIM analysis and model compliance checking has been also made available already (e.g. CYPE Urban, Verify3D, Solibri).
However, none of these attempts have achieved the uptake of a digital building permit (DBP) process that works in practice. A DBP process, New technologies, Open standards-based data exchange need to be developed, connected and aligned for success. This requires: (1) aligning available digital technologies to municipal process, enabling new methods and business models; (2) development of data Open standards, including Building Information Models (BIM), 3D city models and reciprocal integration (GeoBIM); (3) up/re-skilling officers and users; (4) improving, aligning and integrating technology; (5) realizing and demonstrating scalability
Objectives:
1. Develop and demonstrate novel DBP processes
2. Enforce data and service Interoperability
3. Fill the current knowledge gap and up/re-skill the construction value chain (including public officers) in line with the European Recommendation (EU) 2017/1805 on the professionalization of public procurement
4. Improve, develop and demonstrate in an operational environment a set of integrated software tools (from here on called “CHEK checking tools”), to (Semi-)Automatically check compliance to the CHEK regulations using integrated and interoperable (O2) 3D city models and BIMs as input, harnessing the potential of digitalization to accelerate processes with more than 50% and improve productivity consequently.
5. Demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of delivered solutions. Enable different ranges of municipalities throughout the whole European Union, to switch from analogue to digital workflows and methods for carrying out building permits procedures, by reusing the toolkit developed by CHEK.
The actual status of the building permit processes in the participating municipalities has been assessed and evaluated. A CHEK digital building permit process has been developed, as well as a maturity model for the maturity assessment of the digitalization of the building permit process by building authorities.
A virtual assistant for the management of the digitalisation has been developed based on these initial results, using large natural language processing models and decision model. It is capable to assist municipalities in defining the process map of the actual building permit process and to assess the current level of maturity. The virtual assistant provides detailed step-by-step documentation about which actions must be taken to reach the targeted level of maturity, and suggests methodologies and tools for each step.
A process management platform to guide the process and manage the data in the DBP process is being developed and under further improvement and testing. It is based on the well-established and working CYPE BIM.server.centre which was extended to allow a more interoperable connection of several diverse tools in a modular architecture. All the components developed are being connected through OpenAPIs and it can act as a tool orchestrator as well as a data repository. A specific module for building permit CYPE Validation is being developed to allow monitoring and management of the digital building process workflow.
The selected set of regulations was interpreted to extract information from natural language regulatory documents, removing ambiguity, and to define the related information requirements for the preparation of building information models and 3D city models. The extracted information was expressed into logic clauses to support compliance checking needs definition, as a formal input to checking software development. The defined information requirements were later mapped to the standard formats IFC and CityGML. The INSPIRE data model was used and extended to accommodate the zoning and regulatory information requirements.
The formalisation of requirements into standard data model profiles allows an unambiguous definition of data requirements, which can be also supported by data validation, ensuring reliable data and analysis results, consequently. A preliminary version of the CHEK IFC validator is already available, in which the CHEK IFC specification is defined. A CityJSON validator is available as the prototyped OGC Data Exchange toolkit, to validate CityJSON data against CHEK CityGML semantic profile, and is being integrated to validate the CityJSON geometry.
A draft plan for the practice oriented training was designed, to be addressed to designers, municipalities or building authorities and general citizens.
The initial core of the DBP knowledge repository was developed and will be further extended.
3D City Model Viewers, based on the VC Map framework have been deployed for the pilot cities. An extended support of geospatial standards, in particular CityGML 3.0 with support of GML and JSON encodings, was implemented into VCS tools (3DCityDB, 3D Tiles converter). The VCS tools are being extended to support the analysis needed for the CHEK regulations checks for which the representation of the city context is necessary, using the CHEK CityGML-compliant data as input.
CYPE and Xinaps are extending their tools (Verify3D and CYPEURBAN) for analysing IFC models in order to check the regulations selected.
Open-API-based connection between the several components involved in the complex building permit process workflow and CHEK Platform (BIMserver.center) for data exchange and workflow management have almost completely been established and are under testing.
The user requirements were collected. The user-friendliness of tools is being considered and improved in the current and planned developments. Additional feedback comes from the consortium and the Community of Practice.
Four partner Municipalities selected parcels that will be used for the pilot actions. Moreover, a preliminary plan for demonstration and validation has been prepared.
A virtual assistant for the management of the digitalisation has been developed based on these initial results, using large natural language processing models and decision model. It is capable to assist municipalities in defining the process map of the actual building permit process and to assess the current level of maturity. The virtual assistant provides detailed step-by-step documentation about which actions must be taken to reach the targeted level of maturity, and suggests methodologies and tools for each step.
A process management platform to guide the process and manage the data in the DBP process is being developed and under further improvement and testing. It is based on the well-established and working CYPE BIM.server.centre which was extended to allow a more interoperable connection of several diverse tools in a modular architecture. All the components developed are being connected through OpenAPIs and it can act as a tool orchestrator as well as a data repository. A specific module for building permit CYPE Validation is being developed to allow monitoring and management of the digital building process workflow.
The selected set of regulations was interpreted to extract information from natural language regulatory documents, removing ambiguity, and to define the related information requirements for the preparation of building information models and 3D city models. The extracted information was expressed into logic clauses to support compliance checking needs definition, as a formal input to checking software development. The defined information requirements were later mapped to the standard formats IFC and CityGML. The INSPIRE data model was used and extended to accommodate the zoning and regulatory information requirements.
The formalisation of requirements into standard data model profiles allows an unambiguous definition of data requirements, which can be also supported by data validation, ensuring reliable data and analysis results, consequently. A preliminary version of the CHEK IFC validator is already available, in which the CHEK IFC specification is defined. A CityJSON validator is available as the prototyped OGC Data Exchange toolkit, to validate CityJSON data against CHEK CityGML semantic profile, and is being integrated to validate the CityJSON geometry.
A draft plan for the practice oriented training was designed, to be addressed to designers, municipalities or building authorities and general citizens.
The initial core of the DBP knowledge repository was developed and will be further extended.
3D City Model Viewers, based on the VC Map framework have been deployed for the pilot cities. An extended support of geospatial standards, in particular CityGML 3.0 with support of GML and JSON encodings, was implemented into VCS tools (3DCityDB, 3D Tiles converter). The VCS tools are being extended to support the analysis needed for the CHEK regulations checks for which the representation of the city context is necessary, using the CHEK CityGML-compliant data as input.
CYPE and Xinaps are extending their tools (Verify3D and CYPEURBAN) for analysing IFC models in order to check the regulations selected.
Open-API-based connection between the several components involved in the complex building permit process workflow and CHEK Platform (BIMserver.center) for data exchange and workflow management have almost completely been established and are under testing.
The user requirements were collected. The user-friendliness of tools is being considered and improved in the current and planned developments. Additional feedback comes from the consortium and the Community of Practice.
Four partner Municipalities selected parcels that will be used for the pilot actions. Moreover, a preliminary plan for demonstration and validation has been prepared.
It is too early in the project to report