Towards performance-based building construction codes: initial stakeholder consultation: summary of comments
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In collaboration with the Standards Council of Canada (SCC), the National Research Council (NRC) has conducted a series of three consultation workshops (during June 2023) to gather initial comments and feedback from experts, practitioners, industry representatives and regulators across Canada. The objective of these initial consultation workshops was to collect input and suggestions from various stakeholders to refine the NRC’s research and development agenda on a transition towards performance-based codes and standards within the NRC Platform to Decarbonize the Construction Sector at Scale, supporting new solutions to increase innovation potential and productivity. The current compliance path in the National Model Codes (NMCs) for innovative solutions that do not comply with the literal wording of the acceptable solutions, is via an alternative solution pathway. Innovative low carbon solutions must comply with all applicable regulation, while also achieving additional project-specific decarbonization goals. Therefore, with a high-level perspective considering the areas of the NMCs with material-specific and other types of provisions that generally lead to the development of potential alternative solutions and may relate to innovative lower carbon solutions, first steps were selected to focus on the National Building Code (NBC) 2020 Parts 3, 4, 5 and 9. These four parts of the NBC are prioritized at this stage as low-carbon solutions would either be part of, or would interact with, the structural system, fire protection system, building envelope system or acoustic system. Three major topics of the NBC were discussed during the workshops: • Structural design requirements, covered in Parts 4 and 9. • Use, fire safety and egress design requirements, covered in Parts 3 and 9. • Building envelope, energy efficiency and acoustic design requirements, covered in Parts 5 and 9. Stakeholders from academia, government, industry and code development were engaged through virtual workshops to provide their comments on current code provisions for the NBC to highlight requirements where the performance targets and/or assessment methods are lacking clarity. The following topics were raised for participants to share their experiences, insights and opinions: • Gaps and challenges encountered in development and review of alternative solutions; • Current requirements with a lack of, or unclear, performance targets; • Current requirements with a lack of, or unclear, performance assessment methods; and • Which topics and areas should be prioritized for development of performance-based approach when considering application of low-carbon solutions. These initial three workshops were the first in a series of ongoing engagement. A simple presentation of comments received is reported without further analysis. This is intended to provide an objective summary of what was heard from the participants. The list of comments reported is not reflective of the authors’, SCC’s nor NRC’s opinions. While the primary objective of the workshops was to invite input that would inform and refine the research agenda on a transition towards performance-based codes within the NRC Platform to Decarbonize the Construction Sector at Scale, the scope of inputs went beyond the scope of the research initiative. Within this report, all inputs are captured and shared, so that other future efforts may also benefit from the comments shared by participants. In all instances, next steps would be recommended to use comments raised to assist with brainstorming before collecting more background information for deeper investigations on selected topics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.073 | 0.163 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.016 |
| Research integrity | 0.013 | 0.015 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".