Project

Change toolkit for digital building permit project (CHEK) is an innovation and research EU-funded project that will provide an innovative toolkit supporting the digitalization of building permit issuing and automated compliance checks.

Building permits ensure high quality in buildings and city development, realized through the compliance to city regulations. Such regulations foster European priorities such as sustainability, beauty and citizens’ safety and well-being, in line with the Renovation Wave Strategy.

Today’s building permit issuance is mainly a manual, document-based process. It therefore suffers from low accuracy, low transparency and low efficiency. This leads to delays and errors in planning, design and construction. Finally, manual (document-based) compliance checking is prone to errors and suffers from limited accuracy and precision.

Several EU countries have developed attempts to push forward the digitalization of building permit procedures. But none of these have led to complete adoption of digital building permit processes within municipalities.

The aim of CHEK is to take away barriers for municipalities to adopt digital building permit processes by developing, connecting and aligning scalable solutions for regulatory and policy context, for open standards and interoperability (geospatial and BIM), for closing knowledge gaps through education, for renewed municipal processes and for technology deployment in order to reach TRL 7. CHEK will do this by providing an innovative kit of both methodological and technical tools to digitize building permitting and automated compliance checks on building designs and renovations in European urban areas and regions.

CHEK will develop DBP process, New technologies, Open standards-based data exchange. This requires: (1) aligning available digital technologies to municipal process, enabling new methods and business models; (2) development of data Open standards, including Building Information Models (BIM), 3D city models and reciprocal integration (GeoBIM); (3) up/re-skilling officers and users; (4) improving, aligning and integrating technology; (5) realizing and demonstrating scalability.

CHEK will address these barriers to the use of DBP: regulatory context, standards and interoperability, knowledge gaps, technology deployment, and need for scalable solutions. CHEK will do this by providing a kit of both methodological and technological tools to fully digitalize building permitting and partially automate compliance checks on building designs which will lead to an improvement of 60% in efficiency and will lead to the uptake of DBP by potentially 85% of municipalities in Europe. At the end of the project, the results will be demonstrated in the working environment of municipalities and designers.

• A completely re-designed organization model will be implemented in the municipalities, in order to shift to a new agile data-driven and digital-based organization.

• CHEK will bring a series of innovative tools, coordinated by a web platform with external connection through OpenAPI based, that will support designers and technicians during the permitting process, improving effectiveness, shortening times and costs for the overall process, and resulting in less errors.

• A game-changing innovation will also be brought into (up/re-)skilling: it will be the first time that such interdisciplinary knowledge, related to DBP, is systematized, coordinated and structured by a balanced multidisciplinary team.

• CHEK will allow modeling specifically formed BIM and 3D city models starting from a clear definition of Regulatory Information Requirements, translated into IFC and CityGML specifications.