Digital Submission - Preparation of planning and decision-making processes, digitisation of building permit procedures (D-SUB)

Building permit procedures concern an early project phase of construction projects. In Austria, the approval is based on a momentary status of the planning status, which must contain the necessary information to verify the protection goals according to the building regulations or the OIB-guidelines.

Submissions are already being processed digitally in some cases, but the end-to-end and integral use of digital data in the processing of building permit procedures takes place only in isolated cases. An international comparison shows that solutions for complete digital processing of building submissions are not yet widespread, even if an option for digital submission is made possible.

According to a survey among planners by the Graz University of Technology, within 5 years, Building Information Modelling (BIM) will be used by 86% of those surveyed. Most of them get involved in the project before or during the planning of submission. The increasing adoption of BIM, as well as the use of BIM in early project phases provide a good foundation for the implementation of a digital submission for planners.

The aim of this project was to develop and evaluate the foundation for the implementation of digital processes for building permit procedures in Styria. The project started with the recording, processing, and validation of the actual processes of building permit procedures of the city of Graz and the municipality of Stainach-Pürgg. The actual processes were captured by recording the steps on site processed by the BPMN method. To validate them, a fictional building submission was carried out in the city of Graz based on a project originally submitted in Stainach-Pürgg. Based on the actual processes and the experiences from the fictional building submission, proposals for the optimization or redesign of processes regarding the digitalization of building permit procedures in the future were developed. The steps required to implement the redesign of the processes were summarized as recommended actions. Some aspects of building permit procedures and first recommended actions were presented form a legal point of view.

Providing information is regarded as the basis for digitization. On behalf of the planners, this primarily affects legally secured planning criteria. On the authorities' and administrators' side, the importance of the experience of the respective person emerged clearly in the project. To be able to transfer this knowledge better and to standardize the basis of the examination, a knowledge database should be set up. This will serve as instructions for building permit procedures.

In addition to medium-term process optimization, the introduction of a web portal is proposed in the long-term. This would represent the single interface for digital submission. A solution approach in this regard would, for example, enable the central recording of data of the building contractors with the corresponding integration into existing databases. Furthermore better utilization of already existing data, above all GIS data would also be provided. In this way, helpful planning documents could be made available to the building contractor and at the same time the internal processing effort by employees could be reduced.

Projektleitung

Arbeitsgruppe Nachhaltiges Bauen, Institut für Tragwerksentwurf, TU Graz
DI Michael Ortmann, Daniel Plazza, BSc., Univ.-Prof. DI Dr.techn. Alexander Passer, MSc., DI DI Marco Scherz, DI Dr.techn. Helmuth Kreiner

Projektpartner

• Bau- und Anlagenbehörde, Stadt Graz
  Mag. Doris Jurschitsch, Mag. Dr. Heimo Schamberger, DI Christian Zechner
• Stadtvermessungsamt, Stadt Graz
  DI Elke Achleitner
• Land Steiermark, Abteilung 15 Energie, Wohnbau, Technik
  DI Friedrich Kainz
• Bauamt Stainach Pürgg
  Werner Brettschuh
• buildingSMART Austria
  Ing. Mag. Alfred Waschl
• ZT Kammer
  Mag. Armin Ruhri