Finland and Estonia – healthy, safe, accessible spaces

The Finnish and Estonian demonstrations provide an extraordinary opportunity to test parts of the ACCORD semantic framework with two different regulation bases and different permitting and compliance checking software. The results will reveal the value of a common framework approach with national application in practice, targeting in scalability of ACCORD-framework based services.

In the Finnish demonstration, the focus will be on three use cases:

1) building project notification,

2) certain accessibility issues, and

3) climate declaration (carbon footprint of a building). Finland and Estonia will collaborate in defining the BIM-based process for calculating the building CO2.

In addition to building CO2 calculation, Estonia will focus on the technical demands (such as geometry and structural) of fire safety and accessibility. The countries will apply different software for building permitting and compliance checking. Finland will apply Cloudpermit’s software (Cloudpermit/Lupapiste) for building project notification and Solibri’s Solibri Checker for accessibility compliance checking. Estonia will apply FUI’s BIM.Works for compliance checking of fire safety and accessibility. The Estonian Ministry (MKM) provides the Building Registry, supporting the permitting management.

Both countries will use real-life construction projects as testbeds. These projects will be decided in spring 2023. The Senate Properties (owner of large number of public buildings in Finland) will most probably provide a courthouse building project. Riigi Kinnisvara or Tallinn city municipality will provide the building project in Estonia. These projects’ BIM will be enriched with IFC propertysets. The aim is to describe standard BIM data exchange requirements.

Figure 1. Demo countries have modelled their current building permit processes. This shows part of the Finnish as-is building permit process.

Figure 2. Automated rule checking of an IFC model with correct geographical coordinates in the Building Registry BIM based permit system. Background automatically taken from National Digital Twin.