Computer-aided Compliance Audit to Support Performance-based Fire Engineering Design

Abstract

Computer-aided compliance auditing aims to provide an automated system to assess engineering designs against specified regulatory representations. Previous research has largely focused on prescriptive regulatory rules, which are relatively easier to audit than those pertaining to performance-based codes with qualitative criteria. There have been a few prototype implementations of rule-based compliance auditing systems, which tend to represent regulatory knowledge as complex rule sets that are integrated into the system. The drawback of this approach is inflexibility, relatively high costs and dependency on the system programmer to modify built-in rules in response to on-going regulatory amendments. The current research looks at representing regulatory knowledge as a library of compliant design procedures (CDP) and the associated regulatory rules, which are treated as external input components to the system. This would allow them to be managed and maintained independently by designers and regulators as appropriate experts in their respective fields. This paper reports on the development of a computable regulatory knowledge model (RKM), which can be used in conjunction with a CDP for automatically auditing an object-based building information model (BIM). CDPs can be described graphically as workflows in the open standard Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), which can be executed to automate the compliance audit process. A RKM representing the fire engineering performance-based verification method prescribed by the New Zealand Building Code is proposed for use by the CDP workflows to check the design against. The potential of interfacing with simulation tools to provide some of the required input parameters is discussed.