Automated Code Compliance Checking Based on a Visual Language and Building Information Modeling

One of the most important issues during the planning of a construction project is to maintain the quality of the design planning constantly at a high level. Therefore this quality must be checked continuously in terms of accuracy and compliance to the applicable codes and guidelines throughout the duration of a project. Nowadays this checking process is laborious, cumbersome and error-prone since it is mostly performed manually based on two-dimensional planning and iteratively at each planning change by the responsible planning consultant. Recently, various approaches attempted to automate this highly relevant process with the help of digital methods, such as Building Information Modeling, in order to reduce the amount of work and increase the quality of the planning at the same time. Although this Automated Code Compliance Checking has been implemented using a variety of different methods, most of the existing approaches fail because they represent the information of rules in an insufficient or overly complex manner. In this paper a short analysis of the pros and cons of selected existing approaches is given and subsequently minimal requirements for a successful automation of this process are defined. To counteract the lacks and insufficiencies of existing approaches, a new method is introduced which enables an automation using a flow-based, visual programming language, which we call Visual Code Checking Language (VCCL). Finally the practical implementation of a semi-automated compliance check concerning an exemplary German fire code demonstrates the viability of the approach.