EngD Position on Reference Architecture for Interoperable and Federated Digital Building Permitting

The construction sector is undergoing rapid digital transformation, with increasing adoption of data-driven methods to improve the efficiency, transparency, and sustainability of building design and permitting processes. Despite this progress, regulatory compliance and permitting workflows remain highly fragmented across municipalities and stakeholders, often relying on manual coordination and heterogeneous digital systems. This limits scalability, slows down approval processes, and constrains the adoption of industrialised and sustainable construction approaches.

Within the OIVA (Open Innovation for Verified Automation) project at the University of Twente, we offer an EngD position focused on the design of architectural and interoperability concepts for next-generation digital building permitting ecosystems. The envisioned context is a distributed and federated digital permitting system, where compliance checks are not executed centrally but performed by multiple specialised and independent solution providers.

This EngD project focuses on how architectural principles, interoperability frameworks, and semantic approaches can support consistent and reliable information exchange across a multi-actor ecosystem. Rather than defining how compliance checks are implemented, the work emphasizes how information should be structured, shared, and interpreted to enable diverse compliance mechanisms across independent providers.

Key attention areas include the design of reference architectures for distributed digital ecosystems, supporting modularity, scalability, and extensibility over time. This includes exploring how structured data requirements for permitting workflows can be consistently defined with an ontology and aligned with existing standards and regulatory frameworks, as well as how different actors in the ecosystem can reliably exchange and interpret information. Additional focus is placed on cross-organisational interaction and workflow coordination within the permitting process, including how submissions are routed, how results from multiple service providers are aggregated, and how consolidated outputs can support decision-making by authorities.

The EngD trainee will work on designing and evaluating architectural concepts and frameworks that support interoperable, secure, and scalable digital permitting ecosystems. The work will be carried out in close collaboration with the Municipality of Eindhoven and industrial partners, and will draw on expertise in enterprise architecture, information systems design, interoperability, and digital governance. The outcome will contribute to reusable architectural building blocks that can support the development of distributed digital permitting ecosystems in national and European contexts.