A Proposed Model for Digital Transformation of Requirements Management in the Design of Healthcare Facilities

The design complexity of healthcare buildings is ever-increasing, and due to the various codes, regulations, and client requirements that these buildings must comply with, the process of manual requirement management across the asset lifecycle becomes costly, labour intensive, error-prone and time-consuming. This paper proposes a theoretical process model for the digital transformation of requirements management for healthcare facilities. The model is titled “Automated Rule-Based Code Checking” (ARBCC). ARBCC process model is based on a comprehensive review of related academic work, commercial software, and government initiatives that investigated the automation of requirements management. ARBCC’s approach is based on transferring the healthcare project requirements into rules that are machine readable, and can be checked using computer software, then use Building Information Models (BIM) to check if these rules have been correctly adhered to in the design of the healthcare facility at hand. The model consists of four phases: 1- Initiation: In which we identified and collated the rules and regulations of healthcare buildings in the UK. 2- Planning: In this phase, the extracted rules should be classified according to the RIBA stage, then the rules should be either extracted or written for each requirement, and the required BIM Level of Development (LOD) should be identified to check each rule. 3- Implementation: In this phase, the actual automated check of the created rules is performed versus the BIM model. 4-Assessment phase: In which the results of the check is analysed and any non-compliance is automatically reported using the compliance check software. This paper forms the initial theoretical base of an ongoing study that investigates the digital transformation of requirements management. The next phase of the study will be to implement the ARBCC model for a sample of the identified healthcare codes and regulations and analyse the findings