The ADCC Global Summit 2026

For over four decades, automated design compliance checking (ADCC) has been one of the most enduring and ambitious research agendas in the AEC industry. From the early rule-based systems of the 1980s and 1990s to the emergence of BIM-integrated checking tools in the 2000s, the vision of automating the verification of building designs against regulatory codes has driven sustained research and development efforts worldwide. Standards such as IFC have provided the data backbone, while rule-description approaches - including domain-specific languages such as CCL and LegalRuleML, the RASE methodology, and others - have sought to formalize the logic of building regulations into computable forms.

Yet despite these decades of effort, ADCC has not achieved the level of industry adoption that its potential would warrant. Most compliance checking in practice still relies heavily on manual review. The reasons are multifaceted: the complexity and ambiguity of regulatory texts, the difficulty of encoding diverse code requirements into machine-executable rules, limited interoperability across platforms, and the gap between research prototypes and production-ready tools.

Now, the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence - particularly large language models and other generative AI technologies - is fundamentally reshaping what is technically possible. LLMs offer new capabilities for interpreting regulatory language, reasoning over design information, and potentially bypassing traditional rule-encoding bottlenecks. This creates both enormous opportunity and a new set of questions: How should ADCC research reposition itself in the era of AI? What is preserved from four decades of work, and what must be rethought?

Against this backdrop, we are organizing the ADCC Global Summit to bring together leading researchers, public and private owners and clients, and ADCC software developers for a focused discussion on the current state and future direction of this field. The summit will be held on July 9, 2026, at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), Germany.

The summit is structured around four sessions, each designed to tackle a critical dimension of the ADCC challenge:

1.  ADCC software demos: Latest features and future directions.  Leading ADCC software developers will showcase the latest key features and upcoming development directions of their tools, providing all participants with a shared understanding of where the technology stands today.

2.  Bridging the adoption gap.  Why has ADCC not become general practice despite decades of research and development? What are the technical and non-technical barriers, and what can be done to overcome them? This session will feature invited presentations followed by pre-volunteered participants and an open discussion among all participants.

3.  Future ADCC research directions in the AI era. AIs, particularly large language models, are performing remarkably well in tasks that ADCC researchers have long struggled with. What distinctive contributions can and should ADCC researchers make? This session will feature short thought-sharing presentations by organizers and pre-volunteered participants, followed by an extended open discussion on research priorities.

4.  Emerging topics: What’s next?  Researchers will present on emerging and post-ADCC topics - new directions that extend beyond traditional compliance checking into areas that the field’s methods and tools may enable or inform in the coming years.

These are not questions any single research group or company can answer alone. We believe that meaningful progress requires a global, cross-sector conversation - and that is precisely the aim of this summit.

We cordially invite you to join us in Munich on July 9, 2026, to contribute your expertise and perspective to this important discussion. Further details regarding the summit program, logistics, and registration will follow in the coming weeks.

We note that the summit takes place immediately before the 2026 European Conference on Computing in Construction (EC³), which will be held in Corfu, Greece, on July 12-15, 2026. Direct flights from Munich to Corfu are available in approximately two hours, making it convenient to attend both events. We hope this proximity will encourage broad participation from the computing in construction community.

If you have thoughts to share with the other participants, please apply for the thought-sharing speaker slot (10 minutes) with the title and the essence (100 words) of your talk. 

Here is the link to the registration page: https://forms.gle/gr66mTt9mJFQNRhx5

We look forward to welcoming you at TUM.

Sincerely,

Ghang Lee

Professor, Yonsei University  |  TUM-IAS Hans Fischer Senior Fellow

Andre Borrmann

Professor, TUM | TUM-IAS Host 

Robert Amor

Professor, University of Auckland