Team Members: C. Preidel, André Borrmann

Funding: Nemetschek Group, Allplan GmbH

Running period: 09.2014 - 09.2017

Project Description

In construction industry codes and guidelines are used to standardize requirements and thus secure technical standards to guarantee, for example, the stability, operational safety, material quality and last but not least the safety of the user. For this reason, the conformity checking of a building's design planning about the applicable regulations is a significant process during the execution of construction projects. Digital building methods, such as Building Information Modeling (BIM), provide the possibility to automate this checking process. It is appropriate to use the information already bundled in a Building Information Model for a wholly or partially automated conformity check - the so-called Automated Code Compliance Checking - and thus optimize the entire process regarding effort and costs.

When automating the code compliance checking process, a large number of requirements and boundary conditions must be taken into account to ensure reliable results. This includes, in particular, the representation of any information which may be contained in a standard or code, as well as the legibility of the resulting processing system for both human and machine. The Visual Code Checking Language (VCCL), a visual programming language, meets these requirements by representing the contents of a set of rules using graphical elements. In this way, not only all the contents of a set of rules can be mapped, but can also be read and interpreted, in particular, for editors without profound programming knowledge. The resulting graphical processing system can be understood as a flow of information.