Building Research & Information

Advances in digital building permits

Building permitting is one of the key factors that support the sustainability of the built environment because it provides a control mechanism regarding prospective constructions. The policy implications from different countries for the near future express that there is an increasing trend for digitalisation of public services. Accordingly, the digitalisation in construction has taken a lot of momentum in recent years. One of the critical nodes in the process has been recognised to be the digitalisation of building permit procedures, which are highly important and widely used public service. It would be the entry point for digital information to be suitably produced and fed to the built environment management systems, including foreseeing future applications for land registry and cadastre (i.e., three-dimensional (3D) land administration), circular economy, renewable energy promotions, and environmental parameters monitoring and assessment. Therefore, many initiatives and projects have been started and developed around the globe to investigate, develop, and implement solutions for building permit system digitalisation.

This special issue is thus intended to collect papers about exemplary solutions for (but not limited to) the subject areas mentioned below in relation to building permit digitalisation. It will represent a reference to support and guide future developments.

- Importance of the area on which the special issue will focus;

Several digitalisation initiatives and projects are being developed in the fields related to built environment management, including both the Architecture, Engineering, Construction, and Operation and the city management fields. Digital building permits are crucial to this digitalisation process, and the scalability of solutions is as challenging as fundamental to allow an actual implementation in practice.

- How the anticipated contribution of the special issue will advance understanding in this area;

This special issue aims to represent a significant state of the art on the latest developments related to the multifaceted aspects of building permit digitalisation, for the advantage of uptake and implementations and to support further developments in the future.

The topic of digital building permits entails several challenges, offering the opportunity to research multidisciplinary issues related to technical, process, and economic factors of building permits. Scientific articles can cover the following research topics, but are not limited to them: natural language processing and interpretation; rules encoding; information requirements and data standardisation, data format validation and integration (including integration of geoinformation with Building Information Modelling - GeoBIM); automatic analysis, geometric processing; modular and interoperable software architectures, ontologies and linked data methods; integration with spatial/urban planning related checks; changes in process management, adoption of digital building permit, and need for new interdisciplinary skills training.