Automation of Fire Safety and Egress Plan Compliance

Manual fire safety review is a critical bottleneck, causing weeks of delay and exposing projects to costly, late-stage redesigns for life safety violations. Automating this process directly reduces permit cycle time and mitigates the risk of catastrophic compliance failures. The architecture combines spatial analysis of CAD/BIM models, retrieval of localized code amendments, and rule-based reasoning to validate egress paths, door swings, and assembly ratings, flagging only complex judgments for fire marshal review.

Implementation integrates with Autodesk Build or Procore via API, ingesting model data to run computational geometry checks. A supervisor agent coordinates specialist agents for spatial analysis and code lookup, feeding a rules engine. Exceptions are routed to a configured review queue in the municipality’s permit system (e.g., Accela). Controls include confidence scoring for automated findings, mandatory human review for high-severity items, and immutable audit trails linking each decision to the specific code clause.

This workflow automates a critical bottleneck in plan review: verifying life-safety compliance. It eliminates manual, error-prone checks of exit access, travel distances, door swings, and fire-rated assemblies against complex, evolving codes. The operational upside is direct—reducing permit approval delays by weeks, preventing costly late-stage redesigns, and mitigating liability by ensuring a consistent, auditable review layer. Savings come from accelerated project timelines and reduced consultant hours spent on repetitive code cross-referencing.

Implementation integrates with design platforms like Revit or AutoCAD via API, ingesting IFC models and PDFs. The orchestrator, built on LangGraph, manages agent tasks, exception handling, and audit trails. Each specialist agent uses a RAG system over the latest code databases and computational geometry for spatial checks. Complex cases are routed to a human review queue in systems like Accela or ProjectDox. The architecture requires controls for model confidence scoring, versioning of code bases, and immutable logs for regulatory defensibility.

Phase 1 establishes the core document processing and rule engine, ingesting PDF/CAD plans and validating against a curated subset of critical NFPA/IFC egress and sprinkler rules. This initial 'tier 1' automation, deployed as a containerized service integrated with platforms like Autodesk Build or PlanGrid, targets clear-cut violations, generating annotated reports and routing only ambiguous findings for fire marshal review. The goal is to prove the system's accuracy on low-complexity checks, build user trust, and capture immediate time savings in the initial review cycle.

Phase 2 introduces advanced spatial analysis via BIM APIs (Revit, Navisworks) to validate travel paths in 3D and cross-reference material specifications against UL listings. This phase requires tighter integration with design systems and introduces more sophisticated exception handling. Phase 3 finalizes the orchestration layer, deploying a supervisor agent to manage the full multi-agent workflow, handle complex, interdependent findings, and automate the re-submission tracking loop. Each phase concludes with a governance checkpoint, reviewing accuracy metrics and adjusting human-in-the-loop thresholds before broader rollout, ensuring the system's decisions remain defensible and audit-ready.

This automation directly targets the operational bottleneck of manual fire plan review, a high-risk process prone to human error and inconsistency. By automating checks for travel distances, door swings, and assembly ratings, it eliminates weeks of delay, reduces liability from oversights, and frees fire marshals to focus on complex judgment calls. The business value is clear: faster permit issuance, lower risk of catastrophic non-compliance, and significant labor savings for both plan reviewers and design teams submitting projects.

Implementation integrates with BIM tools like Revit via API for data extraction and spatial computation. A rules engine, configured with local amendments, evaluates outputs. Exceptions and low-confidence findings are routed to a dedicated queue in platforms like Accela or custom portals for fire marshal review. Critical controls include an immutable audit trail of all automated decisions, configurable approval thresholds, and mandatory human-in-the-loop for any life-safety critical failures before a permit can be issued, ensuring governance in a regulated environment.

The workflow's effectiveness hinges on ingesting high-quality, structured data from disparate sources. Primary inputs include CAD/BIM models (Revit, AutoCAD) for spatial geometry, specification documents for material fire ratings, and geocoded project addresses to retrieve the correct jurisdictional codes (IFC, NFPA, local amendments). Data quality gates must validate drawing layer consistency and unit accuracy upfront, as errors here cascade through all downstream checks, causing false positives and eroding reviewer trust in the automated system.

Integration points are critical for operationalizing results. The orchestrator must push approved findings and generated comments directly into permit management systems like Accela or Procore, and route flagged violations to designated reviewer queues in platforms such as Bluebeam or PlanGrid. A robust API layer handles these exchanges, while an immutable audit log records every data point, code section referenced, and decision rationale. This traceability is non-negotiable for defending automated approvals and supporting appeals or value engineering discussions during the design phase.