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.