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Use Case
Industry, Innovation And Infrastructure
Sustainable Cities And Communities
BRISE-Vienna addresses the challenge of accelerating complex verification and permission procedures in city administrations by applying the full range of digital technologies to city administration processes. The goal of BRISE was to cut the duration of the verification process by half: from up to 12 months for large buildings to less than 6 months. It can serve as a blueprint for growing cities that have to deal with a certain number of permissions and are willing to make use of the full potential of the digital transformation.
Automizing the building verification process requires to change a historically grown bureaucratic process within the city administration. Vienna refrained from simply turning an analogue process into a digitally supported process. Instead, Vienna developed a vision of an ideal process that would make use of the full potential of digital technologies – such as Building Information Modelling (BIM), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Augmented Reality.
On this basis, Vienna and its partners developed several technological building blocks and integrated them into an embedded digital tool that connects planners, architects, the building authority of the city and the adjacent neighbours of the future building in a seamless process.
Cities and regions across Europe can build on this pioneering work and build their own digital verification processes to speed up administrative processes.
Vienna build BRISE around these core building blocks:
a) Automated Reference Building Model (REM):
The city automatically converts detailed site plans - e.g. from the land use plan - into a 3D reference building model for the site in Open BIM Standard. This reference model represents a 3D representation of the building form and functions that are allowed to be built at this specific site. This modelling process is based on the software FME and it can be adapted to the building plans of any city.
b) AI-based verification routines:
To make sure that all legal provisions from zoning or development plans are reflected in the reference model, Vienna relies on Artificial Intelligence. An automated semantic analysis of all legal documents that are relevant for the specific site helps to extract the necessary additional information. This could be, e.g. the minimum ceiling height, the maximum distance between rooftop and building height, requirements for gardens or underground objects, etc. This information is automatically classified and converted into machine-readable IFC-files which come as an expansion package to the Solibri Model Checker Software. Together with TU-Vienna, Vienna has developed 28 new verification routines and more than 2.500 templates for Solibri. Cities can reach out to TU-Vienna or ODE for obtaining and reusing them.
c) Additional AI-tools for process improvement:
In addition to the legal text analysis, Vienna has developed and implemented 3 useful AI-tools, running as docker containers on the AI-server of the city of Vienna:
• An AI-based search engine for different sources of legal information connected to building law to quickly find precedence cases, legal provisions and internal directives.
• A tool to automatically recognize, classify and extract legal entities in the submitted documents (e.g. names of architects, static engineers, building owners). It has been calculated that this tool alone saves the city two man-years in repetitive manual work.
• A small but helpful tool that automatically identifies and extracts signatures from submitted plans. Showing the required fields as thumbnails to the building verification officer helps to save time while examining the formal criteria.
All tools may be requested by the city of Vienna but have to be retrained based on the own content of the respective city.
d) Augmented Reality (AR) for formal participation processes:
An AR Platform loads the BIM models submitted by the architects or planners and embeds them in the city structure. Citizens – mainly neighbours – are then invited to review the future building and submit their comments in a digital process. The AR-Platform is provided by TU-Vienna and can be adopted by other cities.
All building blocks are integrated via an easy-to-use frontend that builds on the existing Citizen portal of the city of Vienna.
BRISE Vienna was piloted in summer 2022 with real-world architects and planners who submitted their plans for new buildings in Vienna to the new and automated building verification process. Their feedback has helped to improve the overall process and to mainstream BRISE Vienna.
Want to learn more about the lessons learned, financial details and results?
Log inPlanning time: 1 to 2 years
Implementation time: 2 to 5 years
City of Vienna, ODE- office for digital engineering, TU Vienna, ZTK - Ziviltechniker Kammer Accenture
City of Vienna, MA37- building authority
Planners, Architects, Municipal building authorities, neighbours