On Friday, 23 October 2026, Sherief Ali successfully defended his doctoral thesis titled: “Semantic Interpretation and Formalization of Building Regulations for Automated Code Compliance”.

In his dissertation, Sherief addresses a key challenge in the digital transformation of the construction industry: enabling the automated interpretation and verification of building regulations. While Building Information Modeling and openBIM workflows continue to advance, regulatory texts are still largely written in natural language and require manual interpretation by domain experts before they can be used in model-checking systems.

To tackle this challenge, Sherief developed a comprehensive framework that transforms textual building regulations into machine-interpretable, schema-aligned rules. His approach combines deep learning, Large Language Models (LLMs) and openBIM standards to extract semantic entities from regulatory clauses, map them to IFC 4X3 classes and property sets; and formalize them into Information Delivery Specifications (IDS) and rule-based logic for automated compliance checking. The framework was evaluated using the CODE-ACCORD and Eurocode datasets and validated through case studies based on clauses from the International Building Code (IBC).

The results demonstrate the feasibility of an end-to-end pipeline, from regulatory text interpretation to BIM model validation, including successful implementation in model-checking environments such as Solibri. Bridging natural language regulations and machine-executable BIM-based validation, Sherief’s work makes an important contribution to the future of Automatic Code Compliance (ACC) in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) domain.

The dissertation was supervised by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Markus König and Prof. Dr.-Ing. Timo Hartmann (Technische Universität Berlin). Prof. Dr.-Ing. Tamara Nestorović chaired the committee.

We congratulate Sherief on his achievement and wish him continued success in his future career.