Querying a regulatory model for compliant building design audit

The ingredients for an effective automated audit of a building design include a BIM model containing the design information, an electronic regulatory knowledge model, and a practical method of processing these computerised representations. There have been numerous approaches to computer-aided compliance audit in the AEC/FM domain over the last four decades, but none has yet evolved into a practical solution. One reason is that they have all been isolated attempts that lack any form of standardisation. The current research project therefore focuses on using an open standard regulatory knowledge and BIM representations in conjunction with open standard executable compliant design workflows to automate the compliance audit process. This paper provides an overview of different approaches to access information from a regulatory model representation. The paper then describes the use of a purpose-built high-level domain specific query language to extract regulatory information as part of the effort to automate manual design procedures for compliance audit

Generating Fire Dynamics Simulator geometrical input using an IFC-based building information model

Fire Dynamics Simulator (FDS) is an advanced simulation tool used by fire engineers. The work described in this paper enables geometrical information to be transferred to the simulation tool using the IFC building information model. A parser tool has been developed to extract fire engineering related information from the IFC model and a web-based application has been created to generate FDS input files. Several test case geometries have been used to verify the current capability of the transfer process

Modelling and accessing regulatory knowledge for computer-assisted compliance audit

The ingredients for an effective automated audit of a building design include a building model containing the design information, a computerised regulatory knowledge model, and a practical method of processing these computable representations. There have been numerous approaches to computer-aided compliance audit in the AEC/FM domain over the last four decades, but none has yet evolved into a practical solution. One reason is that they have all been isolated attempts that lack any form of industry-wide standardisation. The current research project, therefore, focuses on investigating the use of the industry standard building information model and the adoption of open standard legal knowledge interchange and executable workflow models for automating conventional compliant design processes. This paper provides a non-exhaustive overview of common approaches to model and access regulatory knowledge for a compliance audit. The strengths and weaknesses of two comparative open standard knowledge representation approaches are discussed using an example regulatory document

PENINGKATAN KOMPETENSI GURU DALAM MENYUSUN RENCANA PELAKSANAAN PEMBELAJARAN MELALUI IN HOUSE TRAINING

Kualitas pendidikan yang bagus akan menciptakan sumber daya manusia yang handal dimasa yang akan datang.Faktor penting yang harus diperhatikan oleh seorang guru sebagai ujung tombak pendidikan adalah segala bentuk persiapan yang harus direncanakan dengan baik, terutaman dalam memperiapkan Rencana Pelaksanaan Pembelajaran (RPP). Banyak guru yang masih hanya sekedar meniru RPP yang sudah ada, tanpa memperhatikan kesesuaiannya dengan situasi dan kondisidi mana guru tersebut mengajar. Penelitian ini dilaksanakan di SDN 011 Kembang Harum dengan jumlah guru sebanyak 12 orang dan dilaksanakan dalam dua siklus. Dari hasil penelitian dan analisa data, ternyata diakhir penelitian pada siklus kedua, kompetensi guru dalam menyusun RPP terjadi peningkatan yang signifikan dibandingkan pada pelaksanaan siklus pertama. Hal yang sangat menonjol adalah pada komponen : Tujuan Pembelajaran, Materi Pembelajaran, Alokasi Waktu dan Penilaian. Secara umum, dari hasil penelitian diperoleh kesimpulan bahwa untuk meningkatkan kompetensi guru dalam menyusun RPP di SDN 011 Kembang Harum Kecamatan Pasir Penyu dapat dilakukan melalui In House Training (IHT).Dari hasil penelitian ini, telah terjadi peningkatan kompetensi tersebut sebesar 12 %. Dimana pada siklus pertama kompetensi guru dalam menyusun RPP hanya 74%, mengalami peningkatan menjadi 86% pada siklus kedua

Lessons Learned on Adopting Automated Compliance Checking in AEC Industry: A Global Study

Over the last decades, numerous Automated Compliance Checking (ACC) systems have been developed. However, ACC is still not broadly used in the real world today; little is known as to how ACC can be better accepted by the end users. This paper reports on a multiple-case study to learn valuable lessons from recent attempts to adopt Automated Compliance Checking (ACC) systems world21 wide. Firstly, eighteen semi-structured interviews were conducted with twenty experts from eight countries and supplementary data (e.g. documents, product information, and literature) related to each case were collected. Secondly, the interview and supplementary data were then coded to develop prominent themes. Thirdly, through a cross-case analysis, twelve most determining variables that could influence the ACC adoption were identified. Three path models that explain the interrelationships between these variables and ten propositions that can guide future ACC adoption were deduced. The results indicate that the government should play an important role to facilitate ACC adoption through funding, policies, and incentives. This study also provides valuable information to software vendors for delivering ACC systemsthat meet the needs of the industry, and for innovation managers in the industry to develop appropriate adoption plans for the ACC technology

Critical Design Criteria for Standard, Truncated, and Parallel Chords Cold-Formed Steel Trusses

The design of cold-formed steel trusses can be a very complicated and long repetitive process involving up to 28 load combinations added to serviceability checks depending on the design standards being used. This process is particularly tedious if a near optimal solution is required. Additionally, the risk of introducing human errors is usually quite high as it is a process often done by hand. FRAMECAD Structure is a niche software solution born from the desire to provide a complete solution for constructing with cold-formed steel by a company selling roll-forming machines. FRAMECAD Structure specialises on automating the calculations and design of cold-formed steel framed panels, trusses and joists with minimal user input. However, computational-oriented software applications are often not optimised for performance, hence the inefficiency in obtaining a design solution, i.e. the proposed solution is either not optimal or takes a considerable time to compute. To provide guidelines on the design of cold-formed trusses, this research uses FRAMECAD Structure to study which design parameters are critical and what impact they have on optimising the design outcome

Investigating the New Zealand Off-Site Manufacturing Industry’s Readiness for Automated Compliance Checking

Numerous automated compliance checking (ACC) approaches have been developed over the last half of the twentieth century. However, little is known as to how well the ACC technology has served the off-site manufacturing (OSM) industry from the end users’ perspective. This paper aims to measure the New Zealand (NZ) OSM industry’s awareness and readiness for ACC and explore a pathway toward wider ACC adoption. It first reports on a survey study in NZ with 44 valid survey responses. It then proposes a high-level roadmap with key actions that can facilitate wider ACC adoption through 16 interviews with international ACC experts and a focus group with nine local OSM stakeholders. The results show that although there is a high demand for automating compliance processes, the OSM industry, especially small and medium enterprises, are not ready to adopt the ACC technology. Suggestions to address this include (1) establish the foundation for broad ACC adoption; (2) boost the development of the ACC technology to expedite its maturity, (3) test the ACC technology under different scenarios and customize it for the NZ context; (4) encourage the government to provide funding and policy support; and (5) promote education and training of both building information modeling (BIM) and ACC to OSM stakeholders. The results can provide software vendors with valuable information about user expectations and requirements to develop ACC products that can better serve NZ OSM projects, and help OSM stakeholders in NZ and countries with similar economic and regulatory structures to understand the technological and nontechnological gaps to better prepare for the ACC technology adoption

Using Large Language Models for the Interpretation of Building Regulations

Compliance checking is an essential part of a construction project. The recent rapid uptake of building information models (BIM) in the construction industry has created more opportunities for automated compliance checking (ACC). BIM enable sharing of digital building design data that can be used to check compliance with legal requirements, which are conventionally conveyed in natural language and not intended for machine processing. Creating a computable representation of legal requirements suitable for ACC is complex, costly, and time-consuming. Large language models (LLMs) such as the generative pre-trained transformers (GPT), GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, powering OpenAI’s ChatGPT, can generate logically coherent text and source code responding to user prompts. This capability could be used to automate the conversion of building regulations into a semantic and computable representation. This paper evaluates the performance of LLMs in translating building regulations into LegalRuleML in a few-shot learning setup. By providing GPT-3.5 with only a few example translations, it can learn the basic structure of the format. Using a system prompt, we further specify the LegalRuleML representation and explore the existence of expert domain knowledge in the model. Such domain knowledge might be ingrained in GPT-3.5 through the broad pre-training but needs to be brought forth by careful contextualisation. Finally, we investigate whether strategies such as chain-of-thought reasoning and self-consistency could apply to this use case. As LLMs become more sophisticated, the increased common sense, logical coherence and means to domain adaptation can significantly support ACC, leading to more efficient and effective checking processes

ODRL Policy Modelling and Compliance Checking

This paper addresses the problem of constructing a policy pipeline that enables compliance checking of business processes against regulatory obligations. Towards this end, we propose an Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) profile that can be used to capture the semantics of both business policies in the form of sets of required permissions and regulatory requirements in the form of deontic concepts, and present their translation into Answer Set Programming (via the Institutional Action Language (InstAL)) for compliance checking purposes. The result of the compliance checking is either a positive compliance result or an explanation pertaining to the aspects of the policy that are causing the noncompliance. The pipeline is illustrated using two (key) fragments of the General Data Protect Regulation, namely Articles 6 (Lawfulness of processing) and Articles 46 (Transfers subject to appropriate safeguards) and industrially-relevant use cases that involve the specification of sets of permissions that are needed to execute business processes. The core contributions of this paper are the ODRL profile, which is capable of modelling regulatory obligations and business policies, the exercise of modelling elements of GDPR in this semantic formalism, and the operationalisation of the model to demonstrate its capability to support personal data processing compliance checking, and a basis for explaining why the request is deemed compliant or not