Computer Representations of Design Standards and Building Codes: U.S. Perspective.
Computer Representations of Design Standards and
Building Codes: U.S. Perspective.
(1425 K)
Fenves, S. J.; Garrett, J. H., Jr.; Kiliccote, H.; Law,
K. H.; Reed, K. A.
International Journal of Construction Information
Technology, Vol. 3, No. 1, 13-34, Summer 1995.
Keywords:
standards; building codes
Abstract:
Standards representation and processing in the United
States has had a long and interesting history of
development. The work in the past has focussed
primarily on representing a standard, evaluating the
intrinsic properties of that represented standard, and
evaluating designs for conformance to that standard. To
date, for a variety of reasons, standards writing
organizations and computer-aided design software vendors
have not adopted much of the results of this research.
The failure of the approach so far in the U.S. can be
traced to two distinct areas. One major cluster of
causes is methodological: the initial concepts were not
backed up by usable, persistent computer tools; and the
initial application and model were not representative.
The second cluster of causes of failure is professional,
and has a lot to do with the dynamics of interaction of
individuals and organizations. Future research must
address the inadequacies of the current representations
and create models that are able to represent all, or
almost all, of the different types of provisions in any
given standard; investigate and deliver a much richer
set of processing functionalities, such as more support
for use of design standards in earlier phases of design;
support the treatment of multiple, heterogeneous
standards available from distributed sources; and
determine what type of support is needed to go from the
textual versions of design standards to the formal
models that can support sophisticated computation.
Building and Fire Research Laboratory
National Institute of Standards and Technology
Gaithersburg, MD 20899