A multi-representation method of building rules for automatic code compliance checking

In the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry, design review is an important step that often leads to project delays, as the typical manual compliance checking process is error-prone and time-consuming. As an approach to accelerate this process and achieve a better quality of design, automatic compliance checking (ACC) has been researched for several decades. Rule interpretation and representation is a bottleneck of ACC. It focuses on the interpretation of regulations and the representation of them in a suitable computer-readable form. Despite extensive research efforts, a rule representation method that is suitable to represent all types of rules has yet to be proposed. To address this issue, this research proposed a multi-representation method that provides a “mix and match” for different representations and different types of rules, thereby representing all types of rules with suitable representations. This research is valuable to both academia and industry as it enables the representation of rules with less knowledge loss and more accuracy.