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.