Efforts to automate building rule checking have not brought us anywhere near to the ultimate goal to fully automate the rule checking process. With the advancement in BIM and the latest tools and computing capability, we have what is necessary to achieve it. And yet challenges still abound. This research takes a holistic approach to solve the issue by first examining the rule complexity and its logic structure. Three major aspects of the rules are addressed in this research. The first is a new approach to transform BIM data into a simple database schema and to make it easily query-able by adopting the data warehouse approach. Geometry and spatial operations are also commonly needed for automating rules, and therefore the second approach is to integrate these into a database in the form of multiple representations. The third is a standardized rule language that leverages the database query integrated with its geometry and spatial query capability, called BIMRL. It is designed for a non-programmatic approach to the rule definitions that is suitable for typical rule experts. The rule definition takes a form of triplet command: CHECK – EVALUATE – ACTION statement that can be chained to support more complex rules. A prototype system has been developed as a proof-of-concept using selected rules taken from various sources to demonstrate the validity of the approach to solve the challenges of automating the building rule checking.

<p>Today’s electronics in aviation (avionics) are more complex than ever before. With higher requirements on safety and reliability and with new SoC (System on Chip) technology, the validation and verification of designs meet new challenges. In commercial and military aircraft there are many safety-critical systems that need to be reliable. The consequences of a failure of a safety-critical system onboard a civil or military aircraft are immeasurably more serious than a glitch or a bit-flip in a consumer appliance or Internet service delivery. If possible hazards are found early in the design process, a lot of work can be saved later on. Certain structures in the code are prone to produce glitchy logic and timing problems and should be avoided. This thesis will strengthen Saab Avitronics knowledge of adaptable rule checking tools for HDL, with a market analysis of the tools available. Moreover will it evaluate two of the most suitable tools and finally it will describe some of the design issues that exist when coding safety-critical systems. Finally it is concluded that the introduction of static rule checking tools will help the validator to find dangerous constructs in the code. However, it will not be possible to fully automate rule checking for safety-critical systems, because of the high requirements on reliability.</p>

Safety of workers in the construction environment remains one of the greatest challenges faced by the construction industry today. Activity-based hazard identification and prevention is limited because construction safety information and knowledge tends to be scattered and fragmented throughout safety regulations, accident records, and experience. With the advancement of information technology in the building and construction industry, a missing link between effective activity-level construction planning and Building Information Modeling (BIM) becomes more evident. The objectives of this study are 1) to formalize the safety management knowledge and to integrate safety aspects into BIM, and 2) to facilitate activity-based hazard identification and prevention in construction planning. To start with, a Construction Safety Ontology is created to organize, store, and re-use construction safety knowledge. Secondly, activity-based workspace visualization and congestion identification methods are investigated to study the hazards caused by the interaction between activities. Computational algorithms are created to process and retrieve activity-based workspace parameters through location tracking data of workers collected by remote sensing technology. Lastly, by introducing workspace parameters into ontology and connecting the ontology with BIM, automated workspace analysis along with job hazard analysis are explored. Results indicate that potential safety hazards can be identified, recorded, analyzed, and prevented in BIM. This study integrates aspects of construction safety into current BIM workflow, which enables performing hazard identification and prevention early in the project planning phase.

With the growing number of complex requirements for building and facility projects, diverse domain experts iteratively exchange building design and product data during the design, construction, and facility management phases. Such data exchanges, however, frequently involve unintended geometric transformations, inaccurate project requirements, and insufficient syntactic and semantic elements in building model data. To ensure the interoperability of building information models, this dissertation includes an examination of rules categorized from the Precast Concrete Institute model views and a generalization of the rule logic and structures of each rule set. Moreover, rule logic is coded and implemented on modularized validation platforms of a validation tool referred to as the IfcDoc tool, an automated model view documentation and validation application. This dissertation is expected to help domain experts evaluate whether building design data fulfill the data exchange specifications of their domain and the objectives of a proposed project. Furthermore, to identify unreliable and inconsistent IFC mapping procedures of BIM authoring tools, software developers using the proposed approach would implement an automated debugging process in their IFC interfaces according to the specifications of a targeted model view.

Today’s electronics in aviation (avionics) are more complex than ever before. With higher requirements on safety and reliability and with new SoC (System on Chip) technology, the validation and verification of designs meet new challenges. In commercial and military aircraft there are many safety-critical systems that need to be reliable. The consequences of a failure of a safety-critical system onboard a civil or military aircraft are immeasurably more serious than a glitch or a bit-flip in a consumer appliance or Internet service delivery. If possible hazards are found early in the design process, a lot of work can be saved later on. Certain structures in the code are prone to produce glitchy logic and timing problems and should be avoided. This thesis will strengthen Saab Avitronics knowledge of adaptable rule checking tools for HDL, with a market analysis of the tools available. Moreover will it evaluate two of the most suitable tools and finally it will describe some of the design issues that exist when coding safety-critical systems. Finally it is concluded that the introduction of static rule checking tools will help the validator to find dangerous constructs in the code. However, it will not be possible to fully automate rule checking for safety-critical systems, because of the high requirements on reliability.

This study aims to design and implement a domain-specific computer programming language: the Building Environment Rule and Analysis (BERA) Language. As a result of the growing area of Building Information Modeling (BIM), there has been a need to develop highly customized domain-specific programming languages for handling issues in building models in the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry. The BERA Language attempts to deal with building information models in an intuitive way in order to define and analyze rules in design stages. The application of the BERA Language aims to provide efficiency in defining, analyzing and checking rules. Specific example applications implemented in this dissertation are on the evaluation of two key aspects: building circulation and spatial programming. The objective of this study is to accomplish an effectiveness and ease of use without precise knowledge of general-purpose languages that are conventionally used in BIM software development. To achieve the goal, this study proposes an abstraction of the universe of discourse - it is the BERA Object Model (BOM). It is a human-centered abstraction of complex state of building models rather than the computation-oriented abstraction. By using BOM, users can enjoy the ease of use and portability of BIM data, rather than complex and platform-dependent data structures. This study also has reviewed and demonstrated its potential for extensibility of BOM. Not only its lateral extensions such as structural building elements, but also the vertical extensions such as additional properties for existing BOM objects are good examples. In current BERA Language Tool, many computed and derived properties/relations have been proposed and implemented, as well as some basic data directly from the given building model. Target users of the BERA Language are domain experts such as architects, designers, reviewers, owners, managers, students, etc., rather than BIM software developers. It means that the people who are interested in the building environment rule and analysis are the potential users. The BERA Language Tool comprises many libraries to alleviate common but unnecessary problems and limitations that are encountered when users attempt to analyze and evaluate building models using commercially available tools. Combined with other libraries which populate rich and domain-specific datasets for certain purposes, the BERA Language will be fairly versatile to define rules and analyze various building environmental conditions.