The process and efficiency of monitoring building and construction violations is a concern of the construction industry. The detection of violations requires appropriate and sufficiently accurate spatial information to manage and support a comprehensive inspection process and monitor compliance. A building inspection workflow must extract appropriate spatial and measurement in-formation from a variety of sources, identify potential violations across a range of compliance criteria and determine the quality of resulting inspection reports. This paper presents a framework for supporting building inspections using spatial information and methods to detect construction violations and compliance. Current inspection processes involve issues around the identification of building violations, access to building regulations and existing spatial information, integration of a range of spatial and non-spatial information, and the quality of decisions within the inspection workflows. A survey of building inspectors was conducted and used together with the issues identified to establish the requirements for a spatial inspection framework. The results demonstrate how such a framework can support improved decision-making and reduced fieldwork effort in detecting and measuring the accuracy of building violations involving building placements, street offsets and footprint areas.
We acknowledge the Riyadh Municipality in Saudi Arabia who have provided sponsorship to the primary author and supported the project by accommodating the interviews and surveys completed by building inspectors. We also acknowledge the support and resources provided by Curtin University to conduct this research.