Towards Recommendations for Knowledge-Graph-Based Requirements Management in Construction: A Report on the EU DigiChecks Project.

This paper positions the work of the EU DigiChecks project, presenting its approach and preliminary findings for standardizing and automating the Verification & Validation (V &V) process of permit requirements in construction projects. For the context of Permit Requirements Management (PRM), we formulate and explore four levels of explicitness for modelling requirements, ranging from document-based to model-based, and discuss how higher levels increase automation capabilities. Our early findings indicate that while model-based requirements offer the highest potential for automation, their explicitness is incompatible with current PRM processes and poses challenges for human understanding. By adopting the intermediate level of enriched text as level of explicitness for PRM instead, enabled by knowledge-graph technology, benefits of existing document-based processes are maintained. This level also offers an increased level of machine-interpretability compared to document-based permits and traceable proof of permit compliance across contexts. First explorations of these two levels suggest that enriched text is more feasible for use by non-technical users, also in terms of software solutions already available, than alternative, model-based solutions.