Standards and guidelines in the construction industry are used to standardize requirements to guarantee framework conditions, such as structural stability, reliability, usability and safety. Therefore, conformity checks of building designs relative to applicable rules and regulations are essential. Currently, these checks are primarily performed manually on the basis of two-dimensional technical drawings and textual documents. Because of the low level of automation, the conventional checking procedure is laborious, cumbersome and error-prone. As the building information modeling process has matured, the construction industry has gained the necessary technology to automate and thereby optimize the checking process in terms of time, effort and cost. To automate this process, we introduce a visual code checking language (VCCL), which uses visual elements to translate standards and guidelines into machine-readable language (Preidel & Borrmann, 2015). Similar to other conventional languages, the VCCL is subject to the rules of a logical system; however, it represents information as a visual flow.

To base the VCCL on a sound foundation, we focus on an essential automated compliance checking process, ie preparing information regarding a building model. Because of the enormous number of relational dependencies in a digital building model, we introduce a set of relational objects and operators, which enable the user to define precise information queries that consider relationships. Because these elements are based on the principles of relational algebra, they represent a powerful toolkit for the processing of information and thus provide a wider scope of action for the user.