Compliance Checking on Topological Spatial Relationships of Building Elements Based on Building Information Models and Ontology

Compliance checking on the topological spatial relationships of building elements is vital for ensuring the safety and the quality of buildings. However, the complex topological spatial relationships of buildings are not usually expressed in the design scheme directly. Manual checking is still needed to analyze the design scheme and extract the spatial relationships. Such manual checking is always time consuming and prone to error. Therefore, this study has proposed a compliance checking method based on a building information model (BIM) and building ontologies for the automatic checking of topological spatial relationships. Firstly, the topological spatial relationships are well captured and represented according to the location relation of building elements. The checking rules are further established based on regulations. Then, the design information is extracted from the design model, mainly including the location information of building elements. Next, the review ontology is developed, and the design information is organized based on the ontology. Finally, the checking is completed based on the ontology and checking rules. The authors have validated the proposed method through a case study. The results show that the proposed method could help to achieve automatic compliance checking on topological spatial relationships of building elements.