The building permit process is a crucial aspect of the construction industry, as it ensures the safety and compliance of buildings with local regulations. A significant improvement in terms of accuracy, transparency and efficiency would be brought from digitalization, therefore several projects are being developed on the topic. However, to reach high maturity levels, it is necessary to address the several parts of building permit systems in a structured way, by considering the several subsystems composing the main issue thoroughly (e.g., legislative, organizational, technological, procedural). Therefore, this article proposes a taxonomy of building permit systems that can be the reference to guide and assess related developments across diverse countries, allowing their interpretation in a common framework. Different methodologies for taxonomy developments were applied in this study, including a combination of committee approaches and empirical methods, with a final validation against a use case. The obtained high-level taxonomy of building permit systems can serve as a basis for future improvements in the building permit digitalization and could be the basis for an extended ontology.

The building permitting process is characterized by enormous complexity and multidisciplinarity. It consists of multiple steps, and many involved stakeholders with various responsibilities and personal goals. This, together with the fact that in common practice issuance of a building permit is mostly manual, makes the process long, inefficient and subjective. Digitalization of the building permitting process has been a subject of interest for many researchers. In this work, by implementing a systematic literature review, we map the existing knowledge gaps in the domain that hinder further development and facilitation of technological solutions within the building permitting process. This work demonstrates that the lack of fundamental research and the lack of detailed investigation of each individual sub-process within the entire permitting process, hinder further development of digital or automated solutions for building permitting. Furthermore, we provide a detailed mapping of the sub-processes that building permitting comprises of, as identified in the existing research. As much of the existing research efforts are focused on digitalization and automation aspects, we also provide a clear definition of the different levels of digitalization and automation of the permitting process.