Unveiling the actual progress of Digital Building Permit: Getting awareness through a critical state of the art review

Growing interest is awarded to the digitalization of the building permitting use case and many works are developed about the topic. However, the subject is very complex and many aspects are usually tackled separately, making it very hard for traditional literature reviews to grasp the actual progress in the overall topic. This paper unveils the detailed state of the art in Digital Building Permitting (DBP) by critically analysing the literature by means of a set of coding tags (research progress, implementation, affected DBP workflow steps, ambitions addressed) assigned by a multidisciplinary team. The executed research shows that the mainly addressed aspects of the digitalization of building permit process are the technologies to check the compliance of design proposals against regulations, followed by the digitalization of regulations. Improvable aspects identified in the entire building permit system are instead e.g. the involvement of officers, scalability of solutions and interoperability of data, intended both as data validation and as integration of geospatial data with building models.

Automated summary

This paper critically analyzes the literature to uncover the latest developments in Digital Building Permitting (DBP). The research shows that the main aspects addressed in the digitalization of building permit process are the technology and regulations. However, there are areas for improvement such as officer involvement, scalability of solutions, and data interoperability.