Investigating the New Zealand Off-Site Manufacturing Industry’s Readiness for Automated Compliance Checking

Abstract

Numerous automated compliance checking (ACC) approaches have been developed over the last half of the twentieth century. However, little is known as to how well the ACC technology has served the off-site manufacturing (OSM) industry from the end users’ perspective. This paper aims to measure the New Zealand (NZ) OSM industry’s awareness and readiness for ACC and explore a pathway toward wider ACC adoption. It first reports on a survey study in NZ with 44 valid survey responses. It then proposes a high-level roadmap with key actions that can facilitate wider ACC adoption through 16 interviews with international ACC experts and a focus group with nine local OSM stakeholders. The results show that although there is a high demand for automating compliance processes, the OSM industry, especially small and medium enterprises, are not ready to adopt the ACC technology. Suggestions to address this include (1) establish the foundation for broad ACC adoption; (2) boost the development of the ACC technology to expedite its maturity, (3) test the ACC technology under different scenarios and customize it for the NZ context; (4) encourage the government to provide funding and policy support; and (5) promote education and training of both building information modeling (BIM) and ACC to OSM stakeholders. The results can provide software vendors with valuable information about user expectations and requirements to develop ACC products that can better serve NZ OSM projects, and help OSM stakeholders in NZ and countries with similar economic and regulatory structures to understand the technological and nontechnological gaps to better prepare for the ACC technology adoption.