Post-doctoral Fellowship in the EU ACCORD Project : Semantisation of Regulation and Machine - Readable Rules for Digital Permitting and Compliance Processes - Mines Saint-Etienne (France)
Job description
Mines Saint-Etienne (MSE), one of the graduate schools of Institut Mines Télécom, the #1 group of graduate schools of engineering and management in France under the supervision of the Ministry of the Economy, Industry and Digital Technology, is assigned missions of education, research and innovation, transfer to industry and scientific, technological and industrial culture.
MSE consists of 2,400 graduate and postgraduate students, 400 staff, a consolidated budget of €46M, three sites on the Saint-Etienne campus (Auvergne Rhone-Alpes region, Lyon Saint-Etienne metropolitan area), a campus in Gardanne (SUD region, Aix Marseille metropolitan area), a site in Lyon within the digital campus of Auvergne Rhone-Alpes Region, six research units, five teaching and research centres and one of the leading French science community centres (La Rotonde €1M budget and +40,000 visitors per year). The Times Higher Education World University Ranking ranked us for 2022 in the 251-300 range for Engineering and Technology. Our work environment is characterised by high Faculty-to-Student, Staff-to-Faculty and PhD-to-Faculty ratios, as well as comprehensive state-of-the-art experimental and computational facilities for research, teaching and transfer to industry.
Website : https://www.mines-stetienne.fr/
The Henri Fayol Institute, one of the school's 5 training and research centers, brings together professors in industrial engineering, applied mathematics, computer science, environment and management around the theme of overall business performance. The institute is strongly involved in the flagship projects of the Industry of the Future and the City of the Future.
Website : https://www.mines-stetienne.fr/en/research/centres-and-departments/henri-fayol-institute/
About the EU ACCORD project
The ACCORD project is a three-years EU Project funded by call HORIZON-CL4-2021-TWIN-TRANSITION-01-10: Digital permits and compliance checks for buildings and infrastructure (IA). It starts in September 2022 and involves 21 partners from 11 countries. It is coordinated by VTT, Finland
ACCORD's objective is to digitalise permitting and compliance processes using BIM and other data sources to improve the productivity and quality of design and construction processes, support the design of climate-neutral buildings and advance a sustainable built environment in line with the EU Green Deal and new European Bauhaus initiative. These digitized processes must be human-centred, transparent and cost-effective for the permit applicants and authorities. Another objective is to develop and integrate technical solutions for automating compliance checking of buildings in their design, construction and renovation/demolition lifecycle phases. All this will be based on open and neutral data exchange standards. ACCORD will develop a semantic framework for European digital building permitting processes, regulations, data and tools. This framework will drive rule formalization and integration of existing compliance tools as microservices. Solutions and tools are to be developed, providing consistency, interoperability and reliability with national regulatory frameworks, processes and standards. The solutions are implemented and demonstrated across construction projects in various EU regulatory contexts: UK, Finland, Estonia, Germany and Spain. ACCORD supports work programme KSOs, expected outcomes and impacts by 1) developing open APIs allowing local authorities to choose their digital services without a lock-in, 2) automating the checking of environmental regulations (CO2 emissions, LCA and circular economy) by developing machine-readable rules, thus steering the digital and green transition, and involving relevant stakeholders through co-creation, and 3) creating information guidelines for structured data models to increase the value of buildings and reduce their operating costs and 4) providing the open ACCORD framework based on microservices allowing businesses to connect and develop solutions resulting in a scalable, durable and flexible permitting ecosystem.
The goals of the project are :
- Specify and develop a semantic framework for European Digital Building Permitting processes, regulations, rules, data and tools
- Formalise, using semantics, permitting and compliance process that incorporates data, software tools and stakeholders.
- Integrate existing state-of-the-art tools and solutions in this area and develop new ones that are able to handle a wide variety of data described according to different specifications and standards (IFC, bSDD, BCF) and rule languages (such as RASE, SWRL, N3-logic and SHACL)
- By utilising the semantic framework, demonstrate the automated permitting and compliance processes for construction, renovation and demolition work, taking place in a set of demonstration projects in various EU regulatory contexts: Finland, Estonia, Germany, UK and Spain.
- Foster wide impact and replication potential of semantic-enabled digital building permitting and com-pliance checking solutions at the European and international levels through a combination of targeted dissemination, focused business exploitation pathways, and participation in relevant international community efforts, such as Build-ingSMART and W3C Linked Building Data Community Group
Missions
You will mainly contribute to the Work Package 2 : Semantisation of regulation and open format for machine-readable rules. More specifically :
- You will lead the task 2.1 on Technical Review of Existing Standards: Review of existing ontologies, standards and data models in the domain and how they can be reused for the purpose of the automatic compliance check. Includes analysis of potential alignments between existing ontologies/data models and of representation gaps that other tasks will identify.
- You will contribute to subsequent tasks on the development of the Building Compliance Ontology, machine-executable regulations, and design of rule formalisation tools.
- You will interact with the other work packages and tasks.
Besides the work in the ACCORD project, you will interact with the different members of the Computer Science and Intelligent Systems department at MINES Saint-Étienne :
- Contribute to the organisation of scientific seminars for PhD students and interns
- If interested, contribute to some courses in the a few teaching tasks in the international MSc track on Cyber-Physical and Social Systems.
Job requirements
Profile of the candidate
The candidate shall own a PhD in Computer Science, and have excellent knowledge in Semantic Web.
Recruitment conditions
- Full time
- Remuneration according to the rules defined by the Institut Mines Télécom's management framework
- Desired start date : 1st September 2022
Application procedures
To apply, please send your CV, cover letter and any other useful information on the RECRUITEE platform :
These documents should be received by June 30, 2022 at the latest.
For more information
Research contact :
Maxime LEFRANCOIS : maxime.lefrancois@mines-stetienne.fr
Antoine ZIMMERMANN : zimmermann@mines-stetienne.fr
Administrative contact :
Julie JAFFRE, Human Ressources
04 77 42 00 17
Data protection :
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