Outcomes
The results of the ACCORD project include deliverables such as scientific papers, other studies, and software solutions. These products come from the collaborative work of many researchers and experts. The main goal is to advance knowledge and technological innovation. The papers and studies provide a solid theoretical and empirical basis, while the software solutions offer practical tools and applications. Together, these results contribute not only to scientific progress but also have a direct impact on industry and society by providing new technologies and useful knowledge.
The ACCORD e-learning hub offers free online content on digital building permits in the framework of ACCORD partners.
Explore ACCORD e-learning content and join ACCORD webinar series. The three webinars are spaces of interaction between ACCORD partners and stakeholders.
Take part in 1-hour webinar to clarify questions, give feedback, and contribute to the digital building permit development.
For more information about the webinars dates and registration links click here
Please, note the learning content will be added from October/2024 to April/2025.
These are comprehensive reports and documents that detail the progress and findings of the ACCORD project. They serve as official records of the project’s achievements and are often made available to the public to ensure transparency. Deliverables include public progress reports that outline the milestones reached, challenges encountered, and strategies employed to overcome obstacles. These reports provide stakeholders with a clear understanding of the project’s development and its impact on the field.
| Title | Resume |
 Landscape Review Report | The “Landscape Review Report” of the ACCORD project, funded by the European Union, provides a comprehensive review of current permitting and compliance processes in the built environment, aiming to digitize them using BIM and other data sources. This project aims to improve productivity and quality in building design and construction, supporting carbon-neutral building designs and promoting sustainability in line with the European Green Deal and the New European Bauhaus initiative. The report reviews the adoption of digital building permits in academic projects and software tools and conducts a Europe-wide survey to understand stakeholders’ attitudes towards this digitalization. Additionally, it identifies the current laws, regulations, and guidelines driving building permits in EU member states and models the current permitting and compliance processes in demonstration countries such as Finland, Estonia, Germany, the UK, and Spain. Key findings include a solid understanding of the field’s current state, applicable standards, and national permitting processes, providing a strong foundation for developing the ACCORD framework. This framework has the potential to achieve real change and advance the digitization of permitting and compliance processes, ensuring consistency, interoperability, and reliability with national regulatory frameworks. |
| ACCORD Framework and User Requirements Specification | The document aims to develop and formally document the ACCORD semantic framework and the user requirements specification, supported by digitalization scenarios that will be further developed in work package 3. The ACCORD framework is based on semantics, and its requirements specification is supported by modeling activities, including UML use case and sequence diagrams. Additionally, a specification of the project’s demonstration deployments will be included, identifying any specific requirements of the demonstration. The identification of relevant standards for storing, processing, analyzing, and retrieving administrative and regulatory information related to construction, renovation, and demolition is part of the project, validated by the project’s advisory board. |
| Technical Report: Existing Models | The document focuses on the technical review of existing standards. The main objective of the ACCORD project is to digitize the permitting and compliance procedures in construction, using a semantic approach that eliminates the need for costly and difficult-to-maintain centralized systems. This document reviews existing ontologies, standards, and data models in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) domain to verify how they can be reused for automatic compliance checking. Specifically, it evaluates ontologies related to the AEC domain, reviews query and rule languages, and compares existing reasoners. The results will serve as a reference for other tasks in the project, helping to develop the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction Compliance Checking and Permitting Ontology (AEC3PO) and facilitating the implementation of a sustainable and efficient built environment. |
| BCO Ontology and Rules Format | The report describes the methodology for digitizing and formalizing regulations, the development of an ontology for compliance checking and permitting in architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC3PO), and the creation of a domain-specific language to express rules. It also includes the evaluation of the methodology and the documented artifacts through test cases, and the creation of an ACCORD dictionary of terms from regulations of demonstration cases. The AEC3PO ontology, which is integrated into the project’s semantic framework, is designed to facilitate communication and collaboration among experts, stakeholders, and regulatory bodies in the AEC industry, and its development is based on agile and continuous integration methodologies for modular ontologies. |
| Rules Toolset | Expected in May 2025 |
| ACCORD Semantics Documentation | Expected in May 2025 |
| Transformation Pathways Report | Expected in May 2025 |
| Information Reliability Measures Paper | Expected in May 2025 |
Information Guidelines and Education Package | Expected in May 2025 |
| The document presents the specification of technical requirements and the documentation of the ACCORD cloud architecture, identifying the responsible components and the necessary APIs. The components of the cloud architecture include rule formalization, data dictionary repositories, cloud-based services for building permits, microservices for model and data requirements validation, process execution, data storage, and compliance checking microservices, among others. Each component is described in detail, including its structure, behavior, technologies used, and an implementation plan. Finally, the relationship between the architectural components is formalized, documenting the elements to be used in each pilot. |
ACCORD Building Compliance Checking Components, Microservices and APIs | Expected in May 2025 |
| Quality Assurance and Validation Report | Expected in May 2025 |
| ACCORD Solutions Documentation | Expected in May 2025 |
Best Practices of Modern Digital Building Permitting Processes in Europe | Expected in May 2025 |
Dissemination, Exploitation,Standardization, Integration and Communication Plan | Expected in May 2025 |
Dissemination, Exploitation,Standardization, Integration and Communication Report | Expected in May 2025 |
| Training and Up-Skilling Report | Expected in May 2025 |
These publications appear in reputable academic journals and present the research findings generated during the ACCORD project. Each article undergoes a rigorous peer-review process, where other experts in the field evaluate the methodology, data, and conclusions. This process ensures the quality and credibility of the research. Scientific articles are crucial for disseminating new knowledge, as they allow other scientists and experts to build upon the project’s findings, fostering further innovation and discovery.
|
Type |
Title |
Authors |
Journal |
|
Paper |
Semantic web-based Automated Compliance Checking with integration of Finite Element Analysis |
Patlakas, P., Christovasilis, I., Riparbelli, L., Cheung, F. and Vakaj, E.
|
Advanced Engineering Informatics. |
|
journal articles |
|
Hettiarachchia, H., Dridi, A., Gabera, M. Parsafarda, P., Bocanealaa, N., Breitenfelder, K., Costa, G., Hedblomd, M., Juganaru-Mathieue, M., Mecharniaf, T., Park, S., Tan, H., Tawil, A. and Vakaj, E. |
Data in Brief |
|
journal articles |
AEC3PO: A Knowledge Model for Machine Executable Construction Regulations
|
Dridi, A., Patlakas, P., Lefrançois, M., Beach, T., Petr, H. and Vakaj, E.
|
Automation in Construction journal. |
|
conference papers |
Formalisation of building codes and regulations in knowledge graphs
|
Costa, G., Vakaj, E., Beach, T., Lavikka, R., Lefrançois, M., Zimmermann, A., Mecharnia, T., Alexiev, V., Dridi, A., Hettiarachchi, H. and Keberle, N.
|
Digital Building Permit Conference 2024 in Barcelona. |
|
conference papers |
Towards automated building lifecycle assessment calculation |
Hradil, P., Lavikka, R. and Mäkeläinen, T.
|
Digital Building Permit Conference 2024 in Barcelona. |
|
conference papers |
|
Lavikka, R., Beach, T., Breitenfelder, K. Costa, G., Christovasilis, I., Patlakas, P., Raitviir, C-R., Kiviniemi, M. and Saar, J
|
Digital Building Permit Conference 2024 in Barcelona. |
|
conference papers |
BIM-based building permit process: Finland’s implementation path |
Lavikka, R. and Kallinen, A.
|
Digital Building Permit Conference 2024 in Barcelona. |
|
conference papers |
Leveraging Word Embeddings and Transformers to Extract Semantics from Building Regulations Text
|
Odinakachukwu Okonkwo, Amna Dridi and Edlira Vakaj
|
Linked Data in Architecture and Construction (LDAC) |
|
conference papers |
Semantic bSDD: Improving the GraphQL, JSON and RDF Representations of buildingSmart Data Dictionary |
Vladimir Alexiev, Mihail Radkov, Nataliya Keberle |
Linked Data in Architecture and Construction (LDAC 2023), CEUR-WS Proceedings |
|
journal articles |
Plädoyer für den Fortschritt | Dr. Veronika Schröpfer |
digitalBAU |
Beyond scientific articles, the ACCORD project produces a variety of additional studies that delve deeper into specific topics. These may include technical reports, which provide detailed analysis and technical insights into particular aspects of the project. Books and book chapters are also part of this output, offering comprehensive coverage of broader themes and more extensive exploration of related subjects. These studies are valuable resources for academics, researchers, and practitioners seeking in-depth information and understanding of the project’s contributions.
| Title | Authors | Title of the journal or equivalent |
| Modular Knowledge integration for Smart Building Digital Twins | Fatokun, Isaac; Sheela, Arun, Raveendran Nair; Mecharnia, Thamer; Lefrançois, Maxime; Charpenay, Victor; Badeig, Fabien; Zimmermann, Antoine | https://hal-emse.ccsd.cnrs.fr/emse-04086955 |
| Etude analytique d’ontologies pour le project ACCORD | Thamer Mecharnia, Maxime Lefrançois, Antoine Zimmermann et Mihaela Juganaru | BIM computationnel, des données vers l’IA : Ingénierie & architecture, enseignement & recherche. |
Throughout the ACCORD project, various software solutions are developed to address specific needs and challenges identified during the research. These software developments are designed to be open source, making them accessible to a wide audience. Open-source software can be freely used, modified, and distributed, encouraging collaboration and continuous improvement by the community. These software solutions are practical tools that can be implemented in both industry and research settings to streamline workflows, enhance productivity, and improve overall efficiency.
Github with ACCORD repositories https://github.com/Accord-Project
| API-Development | API Development Working Area |
| aec3po | AEC3PO: Architecture, Engineering, Construction Compliance Checking and Permitting Ontology |
| CODE-ACCORD | CODE-ACCORD: A Corpus of Building Regulatory Data for Rule Generation towards Automatic Compliance Checking a dataset comprising 864 finely curated sentences extracted from English and Finnish building regulations, with a focus on self-contained rules expressed therein. |
| bsdd | Semantic BSDD: suggestions to make BSDD GraphQL, JSON API and RDF better |
| zotero-bibliography | Shared Zotero bibliography |
| OntoEval | Ontologies evaluation results |
The ACCORD consortium has an open-access repository, operated by CERN (https://zenodo.org/communities/accord/), where all open-access deliverables and academic publications, datasets and metadata will be published.
ACCORD has established a comprehensive shared library on Zotero called “semantic BIM” (https://www.zotero.org/groups/3007408/semantic_bim/collections/MVTCT9E3) that is used for ACCORD’s State of the Art research and is open to external collaborators. ACCORD research organisations will strive to retain copyright to publications to enhance their reuse. The Creative Commons license CC BY 4.0 is recommended.