ePlanning and eApprovals scoping study

What we did and why

The VBA supported research by Monash University and The University of Melbourne, through the Building 4.0 Cooperative Research Centre, to develop a road map for the phased design and implementation of a digital platform to facilitate effective, efficient, and timely planning and building permits and approvals, and remove unnecessary delays and costs that impose substantial constraints on the building and construction industry.

Planning and building approval processes are still largely paper based, which makes them inefficient, time-consuming, and costly for both industry and government. Industry is unable to effectively test and plan their compliance against planning controls and building regulations, track progress of their applications, and efficiently track compliance through construction. On the other hand, government agencies handle documents multiple times as they seek input from decision-makers and referral authorities who, in turn, largely work off paper or pdf documents.

This scoping study examined how to integrate existing planning, regulation and policy into new digital building platforms to facilitate digital automatic workflows for checking and compliance testing through the submission of a digital twin, substantially accelerating the time taken to gain pre-construction approvals and improving quality assurance.

This research project was completed in 2021-22.

The University of Melbourne’s Dr Davood Shojaei led the research.

The project was jointly funded by Building 4.0 and industry partners (VBA, A.G. Coombs, Lendlease Digital, Master Builders Victoria, Salesforce, Sumitomo Forestry Australia, uTecture Australia).

What difference this made

The research established that the planning and building regulatory spaces (and their constituent regulatory regimes) are crowded, complex, contested, costly and changeable.

The project found that the limited adoption of technologies in Victoria has led to avoidable delay, little predictability, and a lack of transparent monitoring in issuing planning and building permits.

Digital and information technologies were identified as core enablers to facilitate effective, efficient and timely planning and building permits and approvals. The project examined initiatives in various jurisdictions in Australia and overseas that have demonstrated opportunities and benefits in digital platforms and workflows to expedite approval processes.

The research report makes a series of technical and other enabling recommendations that have been developed into a 'roadmap' that includes identification of future technical, process improvement, and legal and regulatory projects and enablers that have been designed to address the complexity, costs and variability of planning and building approval processes.

The roadmap report includes further projects and enablers to address the causes of that complexity and associated costs which will help revolutionise current systems to a modern planning and building approval system.

A submission by Building 4.0, informed by the findings of the research, is cited several times in the interim report by the Legislative Council Environment and Planning Committee’s Inquiry into protections with the planning framework.