Many developers and building owners feel that regulatory approvals take too much time and effort. This poses a significant delay and risk for building projects. One way to speed up the building permit process is to automate it as much as possible.
Because 2D PDF files are limited in their capabilities, several governments are developing BIM-based building permits. Regions leading this development include Singapore, the Nordic countries, the UK, Japan, South Korea, and Dubai.
The trend is to use the open IFC standard for model submissions instead of native BIM models. However, the standard has not yet offered universal definitions for automating compliance checking. For example, IFC has had a class for walls (IfcWall) but no standard way to distinguish between specific types of interior walls, e.g., partition walls, fire-rated walls, or sound-insulating walls. This has forced companies or authorities to define custom property sets or user-defined classifications.
The RIR project
At this year’s WDBE summit, Tomi Henttinen (pictured) presented buildingSMART’s RIR (Regulatory Information Requirements) project, which will improve model machine-readability for regulatory purposes.
Under Tomi’s leadership, the international RIR team focused on four areas:
- Building permit application data, such as building identification and characteristics
- Life-safety, structure, and fire-safety-related information
- Energy, environmental (e.g., carbon footprint), and re-purposing data
- Accessibility of buildings
The process looked at data needed at four regulatory stages: concept approval, technical approval, construction approval, and approval to occupancy.
The results
The RIR project introduced nearly 300 new IFC properties to the IFC standard and almost 200 new Types. These include the definitions for the previously mentioned interior walls, for example.
The project also created a use case and a ruleset, the Regulatory Information Delivery Specification (IDS), which you can download.
Tomi concluded that the RIR project’s results will improve communication between applicants and regulators. Design and model-checking apps can use the new definitions to pre-check designs before they are submitted to authorities. Overall, automation will make building approval more streamlined and faster.
