Building regulations and sustainability standards like BREEAM are foundational to the quality and safety of what we build — but at the time of this project, compliance checking remained a largely manual, end-of-design-stage exercise. Errors were identified late, remediation was expensive, and the disconnect between design intent and regulatory reality was a persistent source of delay and rework.
RegBIM set out to change that relationship. By embedding rule-based compliance logic directly into the BIM environment, the project explored how designs could be checked continuously against regulatory thresholds — Part L, Part B, BREEAM credits — as they were being authored, rather than after the fact.
What we did
- Developed and tested automated compliance rule sets for building regulations and BREEAM within BIM authoring workflows,
- Explored the architecture of a ‘regulatory layer’ that could sit alongside design data, updating compliance status in real time,
- Identified how structured data standards within BIM could carry the information needed for automated checking — and where the gaps still were,
- Produced research outputs and recommendations for the development of interoperable, machine-readable regulatory requirements.
Why it mattered
The construction industry’s compliance culture had long been one of paper-based submission, manual checking, and late-stage sign-off. RegBIM was part of a broader effort to rethink that relationship — to make regulatory compliance an inherent property of the design model rather than an external gate applied at the end.
The project contributed to a growing body of evidence that automated compliance checking was technically feasible and commercially valuable, and its findings informed subsequent thinking about how digital design tools could better serve the regulatory environment — a conversation that has only grown in importance in the decade since.
The goal wasn’t to replace professional judgement — it was to give that judgement better, faster information, earlier in the process.