Complilogic

Background

The British Columbia Building Code (BCBC) is a provincial regulation that establishes minimum requirements for safety, health, accessibility, fire and structural protection of buildings and energy and water efficiency. This code governs new construction, and architects must develop designs that will comply with the code when designing new buildings. The code is prescriptive. However, a provision of the code allows for architects and builders to use building designs which do not strictly follow the prescribed code if they are able to prove that the design will meet minimum requirements for safety, health, accessibility, fire and structural protection, energy and water efficiency. These exceptional designs are called alternative solutions. The existence of alternative solutions which are not prescribed by the building code makes the process of establishing that a building design is compliant with the BC Building Code a non-trivial problem.

At CompliLogic, we are designing a digital platform to assist architects to develop designs that will comply with the BC Building Code. In the future, the same platform will be utilized by municipalities to verify submitted designs comply with the building code.

Goal

The goal of the Math to Power Industry Problem is to develop an algorithm that will determine the construction requirements per Sub-section 3.2.2 of the BC Building Code

Main Problem

The construction requirements in Sub-section 3.2.2 are listed through Construction Articles 3.2.2.20 to 3.2.2.90. There are 5 factors used to determine the Construction Articles. The 5 factors are “building grade”, “building height”, “number of facing streets”, “building occupancy”, and “Sprinkler”. Of the above factors, “building grade”, “building height”, and “number of facing streets” must be extracted from the architectural drawings while “building occupancy” and “Sprinkler” can be submitted by the user of the CompliLogic digital platform. CompliLogic’s digital platform will use the extracted information to determine the required construction article referenced in Subsection 3.2.2 of the building code.

Skillset

The main skillset required for progress on this problem is some familiarity with reading architectural drawings, understanding building code and the referenced terminology.

The program can be coded in any software program required for this type of problem and suited to extract the information from architectural drawing.

The architectural drawings which are submitted by the user will be generated in Autocad, but these drawing can be changed to other formats (such as Adobe) as well.

Support

No prior experience with architectural design or building codes will be assumed. If the participants don’t have any building science background, CompliLogic will be available to provide resources and assist.

A successful project will consist of an algorithm and a set of visuals answering the questions posed above for the sandbox dataset, accompanied by any BI tool files or notebook code used to produce them.