EngD position: Designing a Context-Aware AI for Automated Building Permitting

Building permit assessment remains a major bottleneck in accelerating new construction and renovation projects needed to meet energy transition goals and growing market demand. While efforts have been and are being made to transition the highly manual process to a more digitally supported workflow, most developments focus on the formalization of the rules and regulations and formal compliance checking using semantic methods. However, these developments fail to account for the highly interpretive nature of often ambiguous and sometimes contradictory national and EU regulations. To account for the interpretative and context-sensitive nature of building rules, it is important to adopt a comprehensive approach to automating compliance checking. Such an approach should determine how such rules are interpreted and operationalized in each specific context and try to support the decision-making based on that context-specific interpretation.

The Challenge

The aim of this p...