Digital Orchestration: Methods for Development, Evaluation and Interplay Management of Digital Regulations in Building Physics

Abstract

The current state of digitalisation of regulations and standards presents a mixture of definitions and method descriptions both in natural and formal languages coupled with collections of digital and analog test cases. This makes predictability and consistency in the application of regulations and standards quite hard to achieve in practice, which increases both the workload and the potential for errors. In this work, we demonstrate the power of digital regulations to fully support Automated Compliance Checking (ACC) on a use case compliant with multiple building physics guidelines. We show the effect each aspect of a digital guideline has on the definition, application, and evaluation of compliance rules in the context of multiple interdependent requirements on the same digital model. Our approach ensures not only consistency in ACC support; it provides a method for reducing complexity in a digital environment where compliance to potentially hundreds of digital regulations must be verifiable. We show how complex interdependencies between regulations can be handled consistently and transparently for the end user. Our preliminary evaluation shows that our method allows the same digital model element to comply to multiple requirements simultaneously, while at the same time preventing inconsistent compliance rule application, overwriting of values, wrong sequence of calculation calls, or inconsistency in units. Furthermore, we provide a scalable-by-design workflow for the systematic development, application and compliance checking of digital regulations.