The ability for computers to interpret and utilise computerised building regulations is crucial for automated compliance checking of buildings, enabling a faster and more objective building permit review. Since natural language regulations are often not designed to be represented formally, integrating formal representations into the regulation drafting process could drive this change. Through in-depth qualitative expert interviews with regulators worldwide, this study examines the drafting process of building regulations. It aims to establish a methodology for developing formal representations in parallel with natural language versions. To be able to do so, the first step is to understand the current workflow and its requirements. The interviewees in this study highlighted several benefits of parallel drafting, including improved regulation quality and reduced inconsistencies. However, they also acknowledged challenges such as the difficulty of modifying existing laws and the significant time and costs required for such changes. This study explores various strategies for integrating formal representations into the drafting process of building regulations. Notably, in many countries, significant progress has been made towards automated compliance checking. However, much of this progress has taken place independently of legislative bodies, limiting the potential of automation in the building permit process. Nonetheless, early efforts by legislators to adopt formal representations are emerging. This study aims to raise awareness of these developments and contribute to the broader understanding of how formal representations can enhance the regulation drafting process.

Building permitting is essential for ensuring the safety, sustainability, and societal alignment of construction projects. Despite interest from both practitioners and researchers, the process remains largely manual and fragmented. Ontologies offer a promising solution by managing complexity and enabling automation through semantic information, though current ontologies in the building permit domain are limited to specific aspects like building code checking. On the process level, the OntoBPR framework integrates multiple domain-specific ontologies for a seamless digital permitting process and provides a workflow to automate the lifecycle of the permit review. Therefore, it suggests integrating the submitted building application using standardized information containers. The paper explores how digital applications can be submitted, reviewed, verified for completeness, and forwarded to authorities, and how permit review results can be gathered to support decision-making and automate notification issuance, and it provides a demonstration in a case study. In conclusion, OntoBPR formalizes a multi-layered ontology that advances and aligns the partitioned building permit process and provides an adaptable framework to harmonize diverse legal, informatics, and procedural aspects.

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.

Building permit processes lie on the divide between architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) and public administration. To ensure consistent and effective digitization in building permitting, it is necessary to consider and merge both areas. Hence, for advanced building permit processes, foundations must be developed, which begins with understanding and formalizing building permit authorities’ organizational structures and processes. Therefore, this study developed an ontology that covers a semantic representation of a building permit authority along with a subprocess of the building permit process called the assignment process. The assignment process describes how and on what basis building applications are assigned to appropriate building officials. Proposing a semantic representation of the assignment process, tacit knowledge from previously conducted data sets was analyzed and implemented in the ontology. As a case study, a sample building permit authority was described and implemented in the ontology. On the one hand, the developed ontology serves as a basis for decision support for building permit processes, while on the other hand, it enables a fully automated assignment process in a building permit authority. The approach not only makes the assignment process more objective and transparent for all parties involved in the building permit process but also allows time and personnel capacities to be used in its other subprocesses.