Fire safety regulations impose very strict requirements on building design, especially for
buildings built with combustible materials. It is believed that it is possible to improve the
management of these regulations with a better integration of fire protection aspects in the building
information modeling (BIM) approach. A new BIM-based domain is emerging, the automated code
checking, with its growing number of dedicated approaches. However, only very few of these
works have been dedicated to managing the compliance to fire safety regulations in timber
buildings. In this paper, the applicability to fire safety in the Canadian context is studied by
constituting and executing a complete method from the regulations text through code-checking
construction to result analysis. A design science approach is used to propose a code-checking
method with a detailed analysis of the National Building Code of Canada (NBCC) in order to
obtain the required information. The method starts by retrieving information from the regulation
text, leading to a compliance check of an architectural building model. Then, the method is tested
on a set of fire safety regulations and validated on a building model from a real project. The
selected fire safety rules set a solid basis for further development of checking rules for the field of
fire safety. This study shows that the main challenges for rule checking are the modeling standards
and the elements’ required levels of detail. The implementation of the method was successful for
geometrical as well as non-geometrical requirements, although further work is needed for more
advanced geometrical studies, such as sprinkler or fire dampers positioning