D-COM offers glimpse into digital future

The UK Government’s Construction Innovation Hub has unveiled its D-COM project, which aims to digitalise compliance checking for the construction sector.

Designed in partnership with Cardiff University, D-COM aims to enable automation, reduce errors, make cost and time savings, and ultimately improve building safety.

The basis of D-COM is the digitisation of Approved Documents, so they are machine-readable and easier to compare against building and product information.

The project will provide tools to automatically determine whether changes have been made to Approved Documents, and use this to identify applicable rules related to any building or product. It will also include tools to create compliance check audit trails, which will help establish golden threads.

Dr Thomas Beach of Cardiff University said: “The successful development and demonstration of our prototype demonstrates the power of machine-readable construction guidance. This project shows that semi-automated checking of building designs is feasible and that its feasibility will grow as information management adoption increases.”

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