The Logic of knowledge

Construction and the built environment sector has often be represented as being functionally unsustainable and inherently inefficient. External judgements are made on its poor financial stability, poor environmental performance and social failure. Internal assessments focus on poor satisfaction of client requirements, regulatory compliance and a failure to learn from recommendations and advisory material. This paper is intended to address the problem of failure to accumulate and apply knowledge systematically, leaving the sector dependant on tacit knowledge, experience and habits. There are plenty of research publication outlining compliance checking solutions based on labour-intensive programming of relatively specific problems, their accumulation into desktop tools (Solibri 1998 onwards) and one example of an integrated solution. The Singapore Governments ePlanCheck (1998-2004) system demonstrated that by bringing together regulatory domain experts, BIM schema experts and procedural coding skills, a solution was developed that accurately checked design proposals against the then current zoning, spatial and architectural building compliance regulations. The apparent success of this implementation led to optimism that other regulations regime could be addressed in the USA, Norway and UK. Successful proof-of-concepts were made for Scottish apartmentnoise performance regulations, and of delivering prioritised advice on mitigating the risk of falls for the UK Health and Safety Executive. The reality was that the solution failed to address two key success criteria: efficiency and acceptability. Requirements are specific to an individual project, and regulations are revised on a 2-5 yearly cycle. It would never be feasible to apply the three-party resources used in the Singapore project continuously to maintain, letalone extend, the scope. In the USA building code compliance is specified and administered at the level of 3000 independent counties. The acceptability of the results was also challenged in that there was no demonstrable connection between the authoritative text of the regulations and the results. Whilst other sectors, such a finance and medicine, are able to apply considerable resources to individual sub-problems, construction needs a generic approach so as to exploit the limited investment in process improvement and R&D effectively. Operable knowledge is the knowledge that can be used systematically to drive design and engineering development and to the verify compliance systematically. The knowledge gap is how to render knowledge operable.