Needs and Case for Action

Current State

Management and control of buildings and infrastructures becomes increasingly important. Public Authorities regulate a larger number of aspects such as:

City Urbanism and Environmental Impact: Energy Performance of Buildings (EPB), Life Cycle Analysis (LCA), Recycle, Reuse and Repurpose (aka City Mining or Buildings as Material Banks (BAMB)).
Occupation and availability or suitability of Building or Infratucture for their use.
The determination of taxes based on surface or the valuation of property.
...

In order to be compliant, constituents and/or project managers in the AECO industry need to submit an increasing number of paper forms or pdfs either physically or via a Constituents Portal or via a Domain Specific Application. Often, lots of technical data need to be provided that are already available elsewhere and need to be encoded repeatedly in different systems with unaligned semantics.

Typically, as outlined in the above diagram, there is no integration with the AECO software tools that are the source of the data.

As said, this is the typical case and not the rule as examplified by the Digital Buidling Permit in Finland (RAVA3Pro, see hereunder in DBP).

Domain	Impact
	As defined by the European Environment Agency Life-cycle assessment (LCA) is a process of evaluating the effects that a product has on the environment over the entire period of its life thereby increasing resource-use efficiency and decreasing liabilities. It can be used to study the environmental impact of either a product or the function the product is designed to perform. When applied to a building or infrastructure, all parts (walls, slabs, columns, beams, ... ) with their structure (layers, dimensions) and material consituents may be accounted for and need to be reported / encoded and this a particularly demanding. Ideally, materials are linked to defined standard classifications that spare the reencoding of all detailed charateristics.
	Buildins as Material Banks (BAMB) also referred to as CityMining or as Recycle, Reuse and Repurpose is a new way to address the value of building materials promoting a circular building industry. Material Passports document the characteristics of the materials that give them value for recovery and reuse. Additionally, reversibility of design is promoted to minimize waste caused by demolition and reconstruction. More on this in the BAMB site When applied to the assessment of a building, there is a need to document the structure of the construction and its constituents (walls, slabs, columns, beams, ...) in relation to Material Passports. There is also a need to relate material assemblies to their eventual disassembly capability.
	As defined in the European Energy Performance of Buildings Directive,The energy performance certificate include the energy performance of a building expressed by a numeric indicator of primary energy use in kWh/(m2.y), and reference values such as minimum energy performance requirements, minimum energy performance standards, nearly zero-energy building requirements and zero-emission building requirements, in order to make it possible for owners or tenants of the building or building unit to compare and assess its energy performance. Depending on the usage of the building, different schemes are applied to assess the energy performance. But as noted in the ANNEX V - Template for energy performance certificates (referred to in Article 19), there are numerous requirements that refer to data that have AECO Tools as source, such as technical characteristics of the envelope (the average U-value for the opaque elements of the building envelope and the average U-value for the transparent elements of the building envelope) or to HVAC data. National evaluation models that support the computation of the numeric indicator of primary energy use in kWh/(m2.y) often use detailed information that goes beyond the envelope. Again lots or required data are originally sourced by the AECO Tools.
	According to the Digital Building Permit conference 2024 the Digitalisation of building permits was detected as the critical knot to be solved, in order to pave the way towards massive digitalisation in the construction industry, and to enable the potential of automation and optimisation in the management of building and city data. The topics addressed in the conference made quite obvious the relevance of BIM. Indeed, lots of data required for a Permit are sourced from the AECO tools. There are better ways to provide the data than paper and pdf forms. Building Permits increasingly rely on BIM data, although often reduced to 2D plans. But very often, information that is readily available in the BIM source is retyped in various forms. It must also be noted that in numerous cases, architects do not produce and use a BIM model. For simple projects, they can dispense with BIM and the effort to produce the model would not bring tangible benefits for the Building Permit and for other administrative processes (Energy Performance of Building, Life Cycle Analysis, ...) given that these processes too often do not leverage BIM. It's a little bit the egg-and-chicken problem. However, while there are always good ways to explain the status-quo, there are also more and more places that rely on on BIM-based inputs to their Building Permits. Indeed, Digital Buidling permits are already a reality in a number of places such as Estonia, Finland with the RAVA3Pro project, Dubai,...
	According to the Land Portal The need for 3D cadastre is growing in importance due to the increasing overlap of property rights in densifying urban environments and due to the increase in property values globally. As property values rise, property owners increasingly want to ensure the legal status of their property is accurately recorded; as more of these property owners inhabit portions of multi-level dwelling structures, the appeal of a 3D cadastre becomes apparent. There are already 3D Cadastres in several places (e.g. Shenzhen, China). Again, lots of data can potentially be sourced from the AECO tools.
	Real Estate Management of public buildings relies on numerous data that record the structure of 'spaces' and that link construction components and equipement to maintenance contracts. Again lots of data could be sourced from the AECO tools.
	Public Revenue Administration encompases the determination of taxation basis that can apply to commercial surfaces, offices, parking, ... Surface data is typically available in the AECO Tools for new and renovated buildings.
	Last, but not least, the Digital Building Logbook is an essential component of a modern administration. The European Commission, in the article on the State of the art of the digitalisation of the building sector, provides the following description A digital building logbook is a common repository for all relevant building data, such as administrative documents and/or data for maintenance and bureaucratic purposes, as well as to assess the buildings’ energy performance. Currently, building-related data, such as data of technical and construction information, building characteristics, energy-efficiency performance information and market transactions data, are limited and often inaccurate. The lack of such data and a common repository to store and display them altogether generates additional costs and inefficiencies, stifles innovation, increases risk and undermines the confidence of investors. Digital Building Logbooks aim to increase transparency and trust among owners, tenants, financial institutions, construction sector stakeholders and public administrations and reduce information disparities. The organised and shared data would not only reduce uncertainty, but also time and costs needed to track down missing information.

Call for action

As is apparent from the above highlights of LCA, BAMB, EPC, DBP, 3DC, REM, PRA, DBL, each of these domain requires data from the AECO domain. The disparate collection of all needed data through independent processes and tools can only generate additional cost, inefficiencies and pains for all concerned participants.
Additionally, the proliferation of distinct semantics and rules for the same data can only increase the level of errors and raise the level of ambiguity and distrust.

Data for Spatial Units and the Land Administration

Spatial Units are a key element of Land Administration.

The Land Administration Domain Model (LADM) ISO 19152-1:2024 brings an interesting perpective on the relationship between Parties, Rights, Restrictions and Responsibilities (RRR), Administrative Units (BAUnit) and Spatial Units (such as buidlings or infrastructure and parts thereof).

flowchart LR
    Party
    RRR
    BAUnit
    SpatialUnit
    Party --> RRR 
    RRR --> BAUnit
    BAUnit --> SpatialUnit

Many aspects of Public Regulations related to buildings and infrastructure appears as expressions of Rights, Restrictions and Responsibilities (RRR) towards a (Basic) Administration Unit (BAUnit) related to a Spatial Unit.

The Cadastre is the primary domain of LADM, but Valuation of property is also included in the scope of LADM and -- in a broader perspective -- the concepts of RRR, BAUnit and Spatial Units are relevant for many administrative regulations.

For a given building, there may be numerous BAUnits (and related RRR), each covering a specific aspect:

Urban Permit BAUnit and related Spatial Unit
Energy Performance Certificate BAUnit and related Spatial Unit
Life Cycle Analysis BAUnit and related Spatial Unit
Housing Contract Registration BAUnit and related Spatial Unit
Tax on Commercial Surface BAUnit and related Spatial Unit
Tax on Office Surface BAUnit and related Spatial Unit
Regulated Parking BAUnit and related Spatial Unit
...

The issue is that while there is a convergence in the Architecture, Engineering, Construction and Operations (AECO) industry towards the adoption of standard data exchange formats (notably BIM / IFC), there is, in the Public Sector, a lack of adoption of standards to support administrative processes related to Spatial Units. Standards such as BIM/IFC are mostly regarded as too complex and beyond reach.

Typically, for each aspect -- i.e., each type of (Basic) Administrative Unit, there will be specfic formats, models and documents requested from the involved Parties to provide Spatial Unit related data.

flowchart LR
    Party
    RRR
    BAUnit
    SpatialUnit
    Party --> RRR 
    RRR --> BAUnit
    BAUnit --> SpatialUnit
    Data["BAUnit specific Data & Documents related to the corresponding Spatial Unit"] --> BAUnit

This means concretely that there will be specific data collection, data processing, data exchanges, documents format and Case Management processes for each type of BAUnit

Urban Permit BAUnit : specific forms, plans, documents, proof of rights, ...
Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) BAUnit : specific forms, geometry, material, quantities, ... for energy consumption modeling
Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) BAUnit : lots of data common to EPC but mostly a separate data collection and processing
Housing Contract BAUnit : number of rooms, type and surface thereof, HVAC, ...
Commercial Surface BAUnit : surface subject to a non residential tax,
Office Surface BAUnit : type of usage, surface subject to a non residential tax,
Regulated Parking BAUnit : type and number of places, electric charging stations, ...
...

This is not always the case and some countries and localities have already adopted a more streamlined approach which often relies on BIM.

However, generally speaking, adoption of standards is infrequent or incomplete and the number of distinct data formats, streams and disparate semantics becomes increasingly problematic. This raises issues for all stakeholders: Public Services agents, involved Parties (Constituents, AECO profesionals, Advisors / SMEs for the RRR/BAUnit domain).

Opportunity with new releases of the Industry Foundations Classes (IFC) standard and the recent addition of the Information Delivery Specification (IDS)

Interestingly, the AECO standardization has evolved towards a broader scope and a better coverage of all elements related to Buildings and Infrastructures.

One of these new features is the introduction in BIM / IFC of Spatial Zones as a way to organize data with regards to a particuliar aspect (security, thermal load, ...).

As reflected in the schema hereafter, there is then a unique opportunity to leverage BIM standards to create a foundation for managing all data for Spatial Unit that underpin their relationship to the corresponding BAUnit.

flowchart LR
    Party
    RRR
    BAUnit
    SpatialUnit
    Party --> RRR 
    RRR --> BAUnit
    BAUnit --> SpatialUnit
    subgraph d4SU
        Building --> SpatialZone
        SpatialZone --> Data
        Data["Appropriate Data pertaining to the Spatial Unit related to the BAUnit"]
    end
    SpatialZone --> SpatialUnit
    Data --> BAUnit

The progress of the BIM / IFC standards are impressive and critical to make this all possible. First, there are not many concepts that cannot be accounted for in IFC. This makes the format ideal for the exchange of detailed and complex information betweeen AECO Tools and for conveying the technical data that are required by administrative processes.

In IFC everyting can be expressed by elements / objects with relationships, geometries (when needed) and properties. The level of detail might have appeared overwhelming in comparison with the requirements of administrative processes and there was no easy way to specify the container (e.g. property set and property) for the required data so that a human intervention was often necessary to find the information with a GUI tool.

With the Information Delivery Specification (IDS) available since 2022 and taken into account by all major tools, there is now a capability to define the information delivery requirements for an IFC.

But all these promises would remain difficult to achieve without the progress made in the availability of Open Source software that makes the access to BIM / IFC / IDS simple and efficient. Notably, IfcOpenShell libraries and tools supports all Create, Read, Udpate, Delete (CRUD) on IFC and ThatOpen libraries and Tools provide effective visualization capabilities as well as IDS editing and validation capabilties.

Other tools, that often leverage these Open Source toolboxes and platforms, cater for extra capabilites.

Therefore, BIM / IFC / IDS can be leveraged to access existing data provided by AECO software but also to enrich / augment data for specific needs.

This is indeed critically important given that IFC files coming out of the AECO industry are focused on the need of that industry and not on the needs of registering RRR on BAUnits related to Spatial Units. There is therefore a real need to be able to enrich / augment data to support administrative processes.

Going one step further

Beyond enabling better data management in support of administrative processes, a structured approached can also lower the cost of creating 'intelligence models' to assist / copilot the administrative processes.

flowchart LR
    subgraph ai4SU_DataSets["AI Learning Datasets"]
        Party
        RRR
        BAUnit
        SpatialUnit
        Party --> RRR 
        RRR --> BAUnit
        BAUnit --> SpatialUnit
        subgraph d4SU
            Building --> SpatialZone
            SpatialZone --> Data
            Data["Appropriate Data pertaining to the Spatial Unit related to the BAUnit"]
        end
        SpatialZone --> SpatialUnit
        Data --> BAUnit
    end
    subgraph ml4SU_Env["AI Learning Environment"]
        ai4SU_training["ai4SU Training"]
        ai4SU_engine["ai4SU Engine"]
        ai4SU_training --> ai4SU_engine
    end
    ai4SU_DataSets --> ai4SU_training
    d4SU --> ai4SU_engine
    ai4SU_engine --AI Assessment--> BAUnit

This is already a research topic, but effective deployment of models will be impeded by the current scarcity of strutured 'normalized' data. The approach that underpins d4SU will help provide those much needed data.