Unveiling the Actual Progress of Digital Building Permit: Getting Awareness through a Critical State of the Art Review

Abstract

Growing interest is awarded to the digitalization of the building permitting use case and many works are developed about the topic. However, the subject is very complex and many aspects are usually tackled separately, making it very hard for traditional literature reviews to grasp the actual progress in the overall topic. This paper unveils the detailed state of the art in Digital Building Permitting (DBP) by critically analyzing the literature by means of a set of coding tags (research progress, implementation, affected DBP workflow steps, ambitions addressed) assigned by a multidisciplinary team. The mainly addressed aspects of the digitalization of building permits resulted to be the technologies to check the compliance of design proposals against regulations, followed by the digitalization of regulations. Lacking aspects are instead the involvement of officers, scalability of solutions and interoperability of data, intended both as data validation and as integration of geoinformation with building models.

Integrated GeBIM Requirements Definition for Digital Building Permit

“…Rule interpretation represents the first step of the DBP workflow (Figure 1) but it is also one of the main challenges in such a use case. The relevant information in documents such as public laws, codes and regulative standards should be captured in a time and cost-effective way to be able to adopt rule checking effectively (Noardo, et al 2022). However, the complexity of the natural language used for regulatory requirements and its interpretation into data sets for supporting the adoption of a digital approach represents an open issue for automating and digitising design compliance checking and, specifically, building permitting.…”

“…A building permit is an authorisation required to start the construction phase of a building and it is granted by public authorities after verifying that the design proposal complies with construction regulations at building and urban levels (Noardo, et al 2022). Building permit checks are traditionally a time-consuming and manual procedure for municipalities and the process is recognised as poorly effective due to multiple factors including, but not limited to, the technical knowledge of public officers in the assessment and the high demand for building permits to be inspected, troubled by the lack of adequate personnel (Fauth & Soibelman, 2022).…”

“…At present, the adoption of a GeoBIM approach represents a significant challenge of the DBP use case (Arroyo Ohori, et al 2018). Recent literature, especially from 2016 (Noardo, et al 2022), investigate the management of geo-data by available standards (e.g., CityGML) (Guler & Yomralioglu, 2021) and GeoBIM interoperability (e.g., conversion of 3D city models to BIM) (Nebras, et al 2020) as essential steps for allowing designers to consider geoinformation as a suitable reference (Noardo, et al 2022).…”

Plataforma BIM para criação de regulamentos digitais no âmbito do licenciamento urbanístico

“…Contudo, este processo ainda é maioritariamente manual, recorrendo ainda, em alguns casos, a documentos impressos. Este fator contribui para a baixa eficiência, morosidade e potenciais erros para a emissão de licenças de construção [4].…”

“…A utilização do BIM para automatizar o processo de verificação de conformidades é um campo promissor, que já conta com diversos exemplos de implementação e investigação a nível nacional e internacional [4]. O caso de Singapura é um dos exemplos pioneiros de implementação, com o desenvolvimento do sistema CORENET, que permite a avaliação parcial do quadro regulamentar a partir de ficheiros IFC.…”