Multi-ontology fusion and rule development to facilitate automated code compliance checking using BIM and rule-based reasoning

Code compliance checking plays a critical role that identifies substandard designs according to regulatory documents and promises the accuracy of the designs before construction. However, the traditional code compliance checking process relies heavily on human work. To help the users better understand the checking process, this study proposes a gray-box checking technique and a BIM-based (Building Information Modeling) automated code compliance checking methodology that leverages ontology. The proposed approach contains a code ontology, a designed model ontology, a merged ontology, a code compliance checking ontology, a set of mapping rules, and a set of checking rules. During the checking process, the ontologies provide knowledge bases, and the rules provide necessary logic. A five-step roadmap is proposed for code ontology development for domain experts. For the time being, pre-processing is applied to create the designed model ontology to achieve time saving. Next, an ontology mapping procedure between the code and the designed model ontology is executed to obtain the merged ontology. In the ontology mapping procedure, the mapping rules aim to mitigate the semantic ambiguity between design information and regulatory information and enrich building information's semantics. Subsequently, rule-based reasoning is applied based on the checking rules and the merged ontology for checking reports generation. Finally, according to Chinese building codes, an automated code compliance checking platform is implemented for real construction projects to validate the proposed methodology.