The prescriptive aspect of the standards of water supply and drainage for building systems and their relationship with BIM-based code checking

Abstract

It is common practice to divide the building projects into subsystems, resulting in difficulties in managing the process. The use of BIM enables visualization of the interaction between these subsystems and the automated verification of the normative criteria. The aim of this article is to analyse the feasibility of automated code checking of BIM models according to the recommendations of the Brazilian buildings systems standards such as cold water supply, hot water supply and sewage. The method consists in surveying standardization guidelines and turning them into rules that can be checked automatically by means of computer programs. The results show that simple comparison rules and properties related to individualized elements are possible to be parameterized, but they also show that the current technical standards present few recommendations that can be changed into rules. The conclusion is that, in the case of hydraulic services building systems, the full and automatic verification of BIM models would only be feasible in a scenario where the technical standards were prescriptive in their entirety, in order to maximize the coverage of project analysis. However, as this scenario does not necessarily increase the quality of the solutions in the system designed, the automated code checking will play a supporting role, while there will not be a change in the paradigm of this type of automation.

Keywords:
BIM; Automated code checking; Water supply and drainage building systems