Foundation of a Framework to Support Compliance Checking in Construction Industry
Computer use is pervasive in our daily life and the increasing demand for computer applications has penetrated into various domains. Construction industry has become one of domains which are more reliable on the application of computer to implement regulatory compliance checking. Like many safety critical domains, the construction domain has its own set of international building codes on construction projects which must comply with. With the increasing complexity of construction projects, many manual compliance checking techniques have shown some serious issues. First, the manual techniques are error-prone due to human errors. Second, the complexity of a construction project exceeds the human limit to deal with. Third, the evolution of a construction project is inevitable and the human maintenance of a construction project is almost impossible because either the memory of the original project design has faked away or some development team members are gone. So, it has become a new trend to employ computers to support automatic regulatory compliance checking in construction industry. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to support compliance checking with the emphasis on the foundation of automatic regulatory compliance checking to certify whether a construction project complies with some international building codes. An example is illustrated how compliance checking is performed in the framework.
Construction and Real Estate NETwork (CORENET)
Construction and Real Estate NETwork (CORENET) is the flagship information technology (IT) project undertaken collaboratively by various government agencies of Singapore to improve the productivity and performance of the construction and real estate sectors. It is a comprehensive network system consisting of a series of IT systems and services that allows seamless and expedient exchange of information between relevant government agencies and parties involved in the construction and real estate industry. Provides an overview of the concept and services offered by CORENET, and then evaluates how this system could bring about changes to the real estate and construction industry in Singapore. Three areas of IT‐induced revolutions can be expected in the real estate and construction processes, if the CORENET system can be successfully implemented and accepted by users. First, compression of time and process is one of the possible outcomes that can be facilitated via the integrated platform of CORENET. Second, knowledge contents would receive growing attention from the prospective CORENET users. Third, reconfiguration of business concept and scope may take place, which may, as a result, lead to the emergence of a new business model and the creation of ample business opportunities for the CORENET users that possess the first‐mover advantage.
Regulation checking in a Virtual Building
Use of virtual buildings is a good way to get a concrete idea about future projects. It may allow avoiding errors discovered after the construction start and thus expensive to correct. In the near future, virtual environments should allow taking into account the whole constraints linked to the construction project (e.g. architectural, technical, regulations, financial, etc.). This is the purpose of CSTB’s Enriched Virtual Environments project (EVE), which aims to offer users the possibility to couple 3D representation of the built environment with physical simulations (thermal, acoustic, etc.) within a Virtual Building. Moreover, EVE integrates a code compliance checking module, which provides users an easy and quick code compliance access. This access to regulation documents enables the user to query in an intuitive way the regulation database that applies to his project, and more particularly according to his interest (fire security, accessibility, etc.). This paper focuses on possible solutions to manage this last issue, which rely on the building data structure and the database containing French building code compliance and documents. The main objective for this work is to conceive a matching to bind these two concepts. Data structure is based on the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), and some tools have been implemented upon these classes, to allow code compliance access. The French regulation database is the CD-REEF one.