Title: AI-driven Regulatory Information Retrieval for the AEC Industry
Abstract: Digital technologies have long been recognised as offering potentially powerful approaches to support design decision-making and address inconsistencies and inefficiencies in the regulatory compliance checking processes. The long-term vision for automatically checking whether a Building Information Model (BIM) complies with all the relevant building regulations is yet to be accomplished fully. Some of the reasons for this include (1) the challenges in semantic parsing of regulatory texts; (2) a mismatch in requirements for representing the building elements that regulatory rules refer to; and (3) the lack of a strategy to align regulatory rules to each other and to building representations. This presentation reports on an ongoing research project addressing these challenges. The proposed solution, i-ReC (Intelligent Regulatory Compliance), utilises state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) and semantic web technologies in semantic parsing-based retrieval of regulatory rules most applicable to the design to be checked. This research focuses on the identification and retrieval of the most relevant and applicable rules from a corpus of several hundred documents that the current set of building regulations require all designs to comply with in the United Kingdom. i-ReC has been integrated with a BIM-based design collaboration platform which can attach the retrieved regulatory rules directly to the elements of a 3D building information model. The initial validation of the solution shows promising results.
Bio: Professor Kumar is currently a Professor of Digital Built Environment and Director of Research and Knowledge Exchange at the Department of Architecture and Built Environment at Northumbria University, UK. He has been actively researching various aspects of digital design and construction for more than thirty years, which has resulted in three books, around two dozen edited volumes, over sixty journal papers including two research monographs and over one hundred and thirty conference and other publications. He has also successfully supervised 25 PhD students as the main supervisor and won research grants worth several million pounds from UKRI (EPSRC, Innovate UK, CIH), the Royal Academy of Engineering, The Royal Society, and the Scottish Funding Council among others. His PhD was on Artificial Intelligence applications in Structural Design and Construction from Edinburgh University, UK. He has degrees in Civil Engineering, Construction Management and Computer Science. Professor Kumar has served in various roles in five UK universities as well as Sydney University (Australia) and as Visiting Professor at Stanford University (USA) and NUS (Singapore). Professor Kumar is a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers (FICE) as well as a Fellow of the British Computer Society (FBCS). He was awarded the London ICE’s (Institution of Civil Engineers) Parkman Medal in 2018 for contributions to the UK construction industry through his research.