Unpacking Ambiguity in Building Requirements to Support Automated Compliance Checking

Abstract

In the architectural, engineering and construction (AEC) industry, manual compliance checking is labour-intensive, time-consuming, expensive and error-prone. Automated compliance checking (ACC) has been extensively studied in the past 50 years to improve the productivity and accuracy of the compliance checking process. While numerous ACC systems have been proposed, these systems can only deal with requirements that include quantitative metrics or specified properties. This leaves the remaining 53% of the building requirements to be checked manually, mainly due to the ambiguity embedded in them. In the literature, little is known about the ambiguity of building requirements, which impedes the accurate interpretation and automated checking of these requirements. This research thus aims to address this issue and establish a taxonomy of ambiguity. Building requirements in Health Building Notes (HBN) are analysed using an inductive approach. The results show that some ambiguous clauses in building requirements reflect regulators' intention, while others are unintentional, resulting from the use of language, tacit knowledge and ACC-specific reasons. This research is valuable for compliance-checking researchers and practitioners by unpacking ambiguity in building requirements, which lays a solid foundation to address ambiguity appropriately.

Integrated GeBIM Requirements Definition for Digital Building Permit

“…However, challenges appear long before the conversion of this information from natural language to any formal language since even for human beings the interpretation of the text, tables and graphical contents of regulations can be open to different interpretations (Noardo, et al 2020). According to Zhang, et al (2023), the ambiguity of building requirements is one of the main issues since it could prevent their accurate interpretation and automated checking. They discussed how some ambiguous clauses in building requirements "reflect regulators' intention while others are unintentional, resulting from the use of language or tacit knowledge".…”

“…Based on the results from rule interpretation, information requirements have been identified and formalised in terms of information conceptual models (object, attributes, relationships) as an essential input to city and building model preparation (Zhang, et al 2023). Both building and city models are sources of information involved in automated compliance audit processes if a GeoBIM approach is adopted.…”