Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
Construction Informatics and Digital Enterprise Laboratory
Seeking to automate the process of fire safety compliance diagnostics in BIM-enabled environment, ensuring that fire safety requirements are indicated through decision support system, and areas of non-conformances are highlighted on building design.
The unfortunate Grenfell fire disaster, where 72 lives were lost, has gone down as one of the UK’s worst disasters of modern time. As a way of preventing future occurrence of such tragedy, government’s response has come in endless forms, including reports, reviews, consultations, and changes to building regulation.
While there are arrays of fire safety regulations and guidelines, their increasing complexity has rather led to unnoticeable design and regulations faults that are not easily evaluated and identified by the manual verification method. This is perhaps the reason why experts like Dame Judith Hackett have called for an intelligent system, as manual building regulation compliance checking is prone to overlook vital safety requirements.
[There are] needs for a new intelligent system of regulation and enforcement for high-rise and complex buildings which will encourage everyone to do the right thing and will hold to account those who try to cut corners.
While different intelligent solutions are being implemented in Building Information Modelling (BIM), there is currently no system for evaluating proposed or as-built designs for compliance with building regulations and standards.
This is especially as the standards and regulations are written in natural languages, only comprehensible by domain experts, and not usually for machines to process and interpret the process. The implication of this is that compliance with vital safety standards is prone to error, subjectivity, corner-cutting, and additional time in correcting non-conformances identified through the manual processes. Studies have suggested that the optimal approach for addressing this challenge is by integrating fire performance diagnostics with BIM.
The approach
Advances in machine learning and analytics offer opportunities for automating building safety requirement compliance checks, which this project seeks to offer. The project aims to create an intelligent innovative system (FireBIM), as a plug-in to BIM software, and it consists of two key elements as follows:
BIMFire-Diagnostics will automatically evaluate building design for compliance with fire safety regulations and allow the users to understand areas of con-conformances. The aim is to develop this as a plugin solution for (i) automatically diagnosing a design (ii) identifying areas of non-conformances with regulations and standards (iii) suggest solutions for improving the design.
Based on the requirements of building regulations and standards, the decision support system would suggest the required fire safety standards, including fire ratings for the different building elements and components.
The impact
The project is currently in progress, but its outputs would enable automated diagnostic of building design and support decision making in fire safety design. Its output would:
Study for a research degree at Leeds Beckett and you'll join a thriving academic community in an inspiring and supportive environment. The Graduate School supports our increasingly active postgraduate research community and encourages students to make a difference to the university’s research culture and environment.
Leeds Beckett University can conduct research on your behalf to help you to implement change and realise your business potential. Validating your ideas with academic evidence can be an essential part of winning contracts and fuelling business growth.
