Analysis of the readiness of regulatory documents for automation: a comparison between the United Kingdom and Kazakhstan

Beach, Thomas ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5610-8027, Kabzhan, Zarina and Shakhnovich, Alexandr 2026. Analysis of the readiness of regulatory documents for automation: a comparison between the United Kingdom and Kazakhstan. Buildings 16 (11) , 2052. 10.3390/buildings16112052

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Abstract

Automated compliance checking (ACC) integrated with Building Information Modeling (BIM) requires regulatory texts that can be translated into machine-executable rules. Existing studies have largely focused on rule extraction techniques and ontology-based modeling within single jurisdictions, leaving the upstream question of regulatory readiness underexplored. This study introduces a clause-level framework for assessing the formalizability of building regulations and applies it to four documents covering accessibility and fire safety in the United Kingdom and Kazakhstan. The corpus was decomposed into 2361 enforceable clauses, classified using a ten-category semantic taxonomy, and evaluated against four formalizability criteria: explicit scope, measurable requirement, deterministic outcome, and design-stage data availability. Clauses were classified as formalizable only when satisfying all four criteria simultaneously. UK documents reached 85% formalizability for accessibility and 90% for fire safety, compared with 77% and 51% for the corresponding Kazakh standards. The largest gap was observed in fire safety, where the Kazakh corpus contained fewer BIM-oriented and spatially explicit checks and a higher share of clauses lacking evidential specification. The proposed framework supports clause-level diagnosis of regulatory automation readiness, and a four-stage roadmap links linguistic structure to digital maturity in both jurisdictions.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Engineering
Additional Information:	License information from Publisher: LICENSE 1: URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, Start Date: 2026-05-22
Publisher:	MDPI
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	3 June 2026
Date of Acceptance:	20 May 2026
Last Modified:	03 Jun 2026 11:30
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/187393

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