A few months ago, a research project for the digitalization of the German building code template (MBO) has been launched together with the City of Hamburg and is funded by the Deutsches Institut für Bautechnik (DIBt). Within a BIM-based building permit process the results of the project shall enable the authorities to perform rule-based code compliance checking, as well as enabling the applicants to perform this checking already before submission.

Team members of the IIB are the research assistants André Vonthron, Marcel Stepien and Angelina Aziz. For more information and details on the project, please contact André Vonthron.

What do you want to achieve with the project?

André: The overall goal of the project is to optimize and digitize the building application and approval process. In addition to the formal check - i.e. whether all documents are complete - there is the technical check in the approval process, where it is checked whether all information complies with the building code.

In the future, building regulations shall be represented as digital rules in an open and software-independent rule language and will be made available via a construction portal to be downloaded and applied by building applicants and the authorities. The model check will then run on both sides with the same rules and basic data. The applicant can pre-check the quality of the model to be submitted and can make corrections beforehand. This avoids unnecessary iteration steps and reduces the overall communication effort between applicant and authority until the final approval. As part of the project, selected regulations from the German building code template will be implemented in a digital format as a prototype.

How does this work exactly?

André: Shortly summarized: Analysis, information requirements, rule creation, prototypical implementation, and evaluation.

A board of expert has been called with representatives of related authorities from various German federal states, where results are exchanged and discussed on a regular basis. The first step is to analyse the regulations of the German building code template. These are then formalized by working out the information exchange requirements for building components as well as mapping the checking procedures to rule-based checking operations. The develop rules are finally validated and demonstrated in a prototypical software application. However, not all regulations of the German building code template are unambiguously applicable to a BIM-model, but leave a lot of space for interpretation. Since computers can only check on an absolute clear basis, the challenge is to define exact rules. In this case, different variants and boundary conditions must be discussed.

In addition to this project, the City of Hamburg and the RUB are founding a buildingSMART Germany round table on the digitization of the German building code template. This provides the opportunity to spread the topic on a wider and national range. Also, the interaction with related working groups is possible, to discuss and work together on common topics, such as fire protection in the BIM-process.

Andre Vonthron, M. Sc. (more...)
Marcel Stepien, M. Sc. (more...)
Angelina Aziz, M. Eng. (more...)