How could BIM support the digital building permit process in the Netherlands?

Abstract

The building permit process in the Netherlands is mostly digitalized, however, there are still some issues. A downsize of information, the manual checking from the municipality, and the duration of the process are some of these issues. To overcome these issues information between 3D building design models, so-called Building Information Modeling (BIM)s, and 3D city models must be exchanged. To exchange interoperable information between BIMs and 3D city models is called integration. In this research, automatic rule checking is performed after the BIM encoded in Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) is converted to a 3D city model encoded in CityJSON. Integration, however, is not as straightforward as it seems. Other researches have been carried out to perform a full integration from 3D city models encoded in CityGML to BIMs encoded in IFC. This is rather complex and so use cases are utilized. In most other researches using the building permit process as a use case, the automatic rule checking is performed in the BIM domain. In this research, a conversion is performed from a BIM encoded in IFC to a 3D city model encoded in CityJSON. The first step in this research is to analyze land use plans and select the most often used rules. These rules are further analyzed on required information to check the rules. For both IFC and CityJSON, the required information for the rules representing the same information as entities in the standards are selected. In the next step, the input models are analyzed on the presence of the entities from the standards. Before the conversion is performed, it is determined which entity will be converted from which input model and whether or not additional information is needed. Finally, the conversion is performed. The 3D city model can be used for rule checking and satisfies the selected rules. The implications of this research are described for the digital building permit process as well as for the integration of the two domains. Guidelines to model correct BIMs for the digital building permit process and further integration are drafted. In conclusion, the tool created in this research works successfully. Automatic rule checking on all the rules in land use plans is technically possible. In practice, automatic rule checking will most likely not take over soon, since rules are still written ambiguously, builders work with 2D drawings mostly, and the Environmental and Planning Act is soon to be established.