ACCORD – Automated Compliance Checks for Construction, Renovation or Demolition Works is the new project of the Horizon Europe program, coordinated by the Technical Research Center of Finland (VTT, FI) in which ITeC participates. The project launched last September 2022 brings together 21 research partners, public bodies and companies from 11 European countries (Finland, Sweden, Estonia, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Spain, Bulgaria, Italy and Norway) and has a 3-year budget of €4,946,911.93 financed by the European Health and Digital Executive Agency (HaDEA).

The general objective of ACCORD is to help European countries to digitize and automate permitting and compliance processes for buildings and infrastructures with the end goal of improving the productivity and quality of projects, supporting the design of climate-neutral buildings and advance a sustainable built environment in line with the EU Green Deal and the New European Bauhaus.

ACCORD will enable the creation of transparent and efficient compliance and permitting processes based on BIM and GIS for buildings and infrastructures.

The project plans to develop a semantic framework for processes, documents, standards, data and tools to process digital workflows at a common European level. This framework will ease the design and implementation of a reference information model and microservices to automate processes of building permits and compliance checking of construction, renovation or demolition projects based on demonstrative cases from different European countries (Finland, Estonia, Germany, United Kingdom and Spain). The solutions will be developed to be consistent and reliable in the existing national contexts. The compliance and permitting processes must use BIM and GIS as input data and may be applicable to both public and private buildings.

ITeC participates by sharing experience and best practices in the current processes of compliance checking and permitting of digital projects based on BIM. For the demo cases in Spain, renovation and new construction buildings will be considered. They will be proposed by the Malgrat de Mar City Council which is the body responsible for granting permits.