ACCORD: Automated Compliance Checks for Construction, Renovation or Demolition Works

  • Active
  • Programme: Horizon Europe
  • Call: TWIN GREEN AND DIGITAL TRANSITION 2021 (HORIZON-CL4-2021-TWIN-TRANSITION-01)
  • Start date: 01.09.2022
  • End date: 31.08.2025

ACCORD (Automated Compliance Checks for Construction, Renovation or Demolition Works) is a project funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme, call “TWIN GREEN AND DIGITAL TRANSITION 2021” (HORIZON-CL4-2021-TWIN-TRANSITION-01)

ACCORD aims to digitalize permitting and compliance processes using Natural Language Processing (NLP) over regulatory texts, Building Information Modeling (BIM) data, CityGML, data dictionaries and other data sources in order to improve the productivity and quality of design and construction processes. The project also keeps in line with the EU Green Deal and new European Bauhaus initiatives through supporting the design of climate-neutral buildings and advancing a sustainable built environment.

Project website: https://accordproject.eu/
CORDIS website: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101056973
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/accord-project/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9YjlEJh4fYYx7b0prL8LZA

Contact: Vladimir Alexiev

Project Overview

The project will develop a semantic framework for European digital building permitting processes, regulations, data and tools. This framework will drive rule formalization and integration of existing architectural rule validation and compliance tools as microservices. Solutions and tools will be developed, providing consistency, interoperability and reliability with national regulatory frameworks, processes and standards. All outcomes will be based on open and neutral data exchange standards. The solutions will be implemented and demonstrated across construction projects in various EU regulatory contexts: UK, Finland, Estonia, Germany and Spain.

ACCORD supports work programme Key Strategic Orientations, expected outcomes and impacts by:

  • Developing open APIs allowing local authorities to choose their digital services while avoiding vendor lock-in;
  • Elaborating machine-readable rules from regulation text;
  • Automated assessment of environmental factors (CO2 emissions, LCA and circular economy), thus steering the digital and green transition, and involving relevant stakeholders through co-creation;
  • Creating information guidelines for structured data models to increase the value of buildings and reduce their operating costs;
  • Providing the open ACCORD framework based on microservices allowing businesses to connect and develop solutions resulting in a scalable, durable and flexible permitting ecosystem.

Ontotext’s Role

Sirma AI, trading as Ontotext, is one of the semantic participants in the project, along with Institut Mines-Telecom, Jonkoping University, Fundació Privada Universitat i Tecnologia and other partners.The company will leverage 21 years of extensive industry experience and bring in a commercial suite of semantic technologies enabling better data management, semantic integration and semantic search. Further expertise in the project will be contributed by the Knowledge Graph Solutions group focused on industrial data that encompases manufacturing, construction, energy, infrastructure, transport, logistics and product classification.  

In the context of the project, Ontotext will work on the semantic representation of regulations data as well as open format for machine readable rules, a building compliance ontology, rule elaboration tool and a GraphDB Connector for efficient querying of architectural and engineering data.

The company will contribute to the development of micro-services that integrate and automate manual validation steps of design and construction and to the implementation of ACCORD building compliance checking components.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No:101056973. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

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