Deep Compliance Review for a Major U.S. Airport

Finding compliance risks — and opportunities to reduce unnecessary cost

A major U.S. airport used Core Runway to review project design documents against its internal design requirements and standards.

Airport projects are unusually difficult to review. Requirements can span architecture, electrical systems, life safety, tenant standards, airfield operations, FAA procedures, sustainability, procurement and facilities maintenance. Those requirements are often distributed across multiple manuals, drawings, specifications and project-specific documents.

Core Runway was used to compare the project documentation systematically against those requirements and identify areas where the design was:

Non-compliant, partially compliant, or more restrictive than necessary.

That final category matters. Compliance review is not only about finding what is missing. It can also identify where the project has specified a more expensive or restrictive solution than the owner's standard actually requires — creating an opportunity for value engineering.

What Core Runway found

The review surfaced issues across several disciplines, ranging from straightforward specification conflicts to requirements that required reasoning across multiple documents.

Approval requirements were not aligned

The airport standard required certain lighting products to be approved by Facilities Maintenance.

The project documentation instead referenced different approval authorities, including review by the engineer, architect and owner.

Core Runway identified that the required Facilities Maintenance approval had effectively disappeared from the project requirements.

This is the kind of issue that can easily pass conventional review because both documents appear reasonable when read independently.

A prohibited product was explicitly specified

In another lighting example, the tenant design standard prohibited certain lamp types.

The project lighting fixture schedule nevertheless specified one of those prohibited lamps.

Core Runway connected the product schedule to the governing tenant requirement and flagged the contradiction directly.

Construction-phase stormwater requirements were missing

Airport requirements called for appropriate stormwater-management measures during construction.

The submitted project documents addressed interior tenant work and associated building systems, but did not specify the required erosion, sediment or stormwater controls for the construction period.

Core Runway identified the missing requirement and linked it back to the relevant standard.

FAA coordination risk was identified

The airport's requirements called for development to conform with the approved Airport Layout Plan and required FAA coordination where crane activity could affect airport operations.

The project documentation indicated rooftop equipment replacement that could require crane access, but the submission did not include the corresponding crane requirement or FAA Form 7460 coordination.

Core Runway flagged the issue as a potential regulatory and schedule risk before it could become a construction-phase problem.

Fire-rating requirements were not demonstrated

The airport standard required a specific Class I fire rating for a corner-guard product.

The drawings and associated project documentation did not provide evidence that the selected product met that requirement.

Core Runway identified the missing compliance evidence and linked the finding to the relevant drawings and specification information.

Core Runway also found cases where the project was stricter than the rule

Not every finding represents a deficiency.

In several cases, the project documentation imposed requirements that were more restrictive than the airport's own standard.

For example, an airport rule prohibited specific legacy lighting technologies for general-purpose use.

The project documentation went significantly further, requiring LED lighting throughout and effectively prohibiting a wider range of otherwise permissible technologies.

Similarly, where the airport requirement prohibited a specific fluorescent configuration, the project standard required LED exclusively.

These are technically compliant designs — but they may also represent an opportunity.

By identifying where the project has gone beyond the owner's actual requirement, Core Runway gives the design and construction teams a chance to ask:

Is the stricter requirement intentional, or are we paying for performance the owner never asked for?

That turns compliance review into a potential source of value engineering and cost reduction, not simply risk detection.

Why this matters for airports

Airport standards are complex because they sit at the intersection of normal building design and highly specialized operational requirements.

A single project may need to satisfy:

• airport design standards;

• tenant design standards;

• building and life-safety requirements;

• FAA-related procedures;

• facilities-maintenance requirements;

• sustainability requirements;

• security and operational constraints;

• and project-specific specifications and drawings.

No reviewer can practically hold every one of those relationships in their head simultaneously.

Core Runway converts those standards into structured, traceable rules and evaluates them systematically against project documentation.

Each finding shows:

the governing rule → the project evidence → the reasoning → the compliance assessment

This gives owners, architects and contractors a review process that is both deeper and easier to audit.

More than a compliance checker

The airport project demonstrated that Core Runway can uncover three different categories of value:

Risk avoidanceFinding requirements that have been omitted, contradicted or inadequately demonstrated.

Design coordinationIdentifying conflicts between standards, specifications and drawings that might otherwise surface later as RFIs or change orders.

Value engineeringFinding areas where project requirements exceed the governing standard and may be adding unnecessary cost or complexity.

For complex institutional projects, that means compliance review becomes more than a final QA/QC exercise.

It becomes a way to make the project safer, more compliant, better coordinated and potentially less expensive before construction begins.

Deep Compliance Review for a Major U.S. Research University

Finding what conventional design review misses

A major U.S. research university engaged Core Runway to evaluate how AI could improve compliance checking across complex construction documents.

The university maintains detailed design standards governing how buildings and infrastructure should be designed, specified and constructed. These requirements cover disciplines including mechanical, electrical, plumbing, architectural systems and equipment.

The challenge is familiar to large institutional owners: the standards are extensive, project documentation runs to thousands of pages, and determining whether every applicable requirement has been correctly reflected across drawings and specifications is extraordinarily difficult for human reviewers.

Core Runway was used to perform a deep compliance analysis of an existing project against the university's own design requirements.

The challenge

Traditional QA/QC relies heavily on experienced architects and engineers manually reviewing drawings, specifications and owner standards.

But the reviewer must simultaneously understand:

• which institutional rules apply to each part of the design;

• where the relevant information appears across hundreds of drawings and specification sections;

• whether a requirement has been explicitly satisfied;

• whether apparently compliant designs contain subtle contradictions;

• and whether different documents agree with one another.

General-purpose AI models face a similar problem. Simply loading thousands of pages into an LLM and asking it to "find compliance issues" produces relatively shallow results because the model has little understanding of which rules should be evaluated against which parts of the building.

Core Runway approaches the problem differently.

The Core Runway approach

The university's design standards were first converted into structured, traceable compliance requirements.

Core Runway's compliance ontology then associates those requirements with the relevant building systems, disciplines, equipment, materials and design information.

Project drawings and specifications are analyzed in the same structured way.

Instead of asking an AI model to reason across the entire document set at once, Core Runway can determine:

What should be checked, where it should be checked, and what evidence should demonstrate compliance.

The platform then performs thousands of targeted comparisons and returns findings linked to both the originating requirement and the relevant project documentation.

The result

The review identified more than 1,600 potential compliance issues across the project documentation.

These were not simply keyword mismatches or missing notes. Many required reasoning across different documents, drawings and engineering concepts.

Findings ranged from straightforward documentation omissions to potentially significant design conflicts requiring professional review.

Example findings

Missing chilled-water relief valves

University requirements called for relief valves on both the building and campus sides of chilled-water heat exchangers.

Core Runway located the relevant heat exchangers on the mechanical drawings and determined that the required relief valves were not indicated.

Emergency-power transformer requirement

The university standard required a dedicated dry-type, high-efficiency transformer for emergency power.

The electrical documents showed emergency transfer equipment and emergency panels, but the transformer schedule identified only a transformer associated with the normal-power system.

Core Runway flagged the absence of evidence for the required emergency transformer.

Prohibited pad-mounted transformer

The university's electrical requirements specified transformers located in vaults and prohibited installation on concrete pads.

Core Runway identified a drawing detail showing a transformer installed on a concrete pad and independently located the equipment schedule describing the same transformer as pad-mounted.

The system connected these pieces of evidence and flagged the configuration against the university requirement.

Non-compliant access doors

Mechanical requirements called for hinged access doors at specific dampers and reheat coils.

The architectural specification permitted lift-out gypsum access panels.

Although both documents were individually reasonable, Core Runway recognized that the permitted architectural product could conflict with the university's operational requirement for hinged access.

Incomplete floor-drain configuration

The university standard required several specific components within a floor-drain assembly.

Core Runway located the specified drain detail and identified multiple required elements that were not shown, including the required sediment-bucket configuration.

Incomplete air-terminal schedule

University standards specified the information that should be included in air-terminal schedules, including parameters such as room number, model, velocity, airflow, pressure drop and acoustic performance.

Core Runway compared that requirement with the project's schedule and identified required data fields that were absent.

Why this matters

No individual finding is the central story.

The important result is the scale and depth of review that becomes possible when institutional requirements, specifications and drawings can be evaluated systematically rather than sampled manually.

A human reviewer may know exactly what a compliant chilled-water system or electrical installation should look like. The difficulty is applying thousands of such requirements consistently across thousands of pages of project documentation.

Core Runway turns that institutional knowledge into a repeatable compliance process.

For the owner, that creates the opportunity to identify problems while they are still information problems—before they become RFIs, change orders, field rework or permanent departures from institutional standards.

From documents to institutional knowledge

The project also demonstrated an important difference between Core Runway and conventional document-search or general-purpose AI systems.

Core Runway does not treat an owner's design manual as simply another collection of PDFs.

The platform builds a structured representation of the relationships between:

owner requirements → building systems → specifications → drawings → equipment → materials → compliance evidence

That structure allows the AI to reason much more deeply about whether a design actually satisfies an owner's requirements.

It also creates a reusable institutional compliance layer that can be applied across future projects.

The opportunity

For major institutional owners managing hundreds of buildings and billions of dollars of capital investment, even very effective human QA/QC cannot examine every possible relationship between every requirement and every element of a design.

Core Runway is designed to augment those teams—not replace their professional judgment.

The platform gives architects, engineers and owners a much larger and more systematic set of issues to evaluate, while maintaining traceability back to the underlying source material.

The result is a fundamentally different level of design assurance: deep compliance review at a scale that was previously impractical.

Checking Thousands of Pages Against an Owner’s Design Standards

The Challenge

Institutional owners such as universities and healthcare systems create detailed design standards covering everything from finishes and mechanical systems to laboratories and specialist equipment.

The challenge is making sure those standards are actually reflected in each new project.

A single project specification can contain thousands of pages. Comparing it manually against hundreds or thousands of pages of owner requirements is extremely time-consuming, difficult to perform consistently, and easy to repeat differently from one project to the next.

The Test

Core Runway was tested on a completed university construction project.

The platform compared:

1,000 pages of institutional design standards

against

2,800 pages of project specifications

Core Runway analyzed the documents, identified potential conflicts and partial compliance, and linked each finding back to the relevant project and standards documentation.

The Results

The review identified:

• 652 potential non-compliances

• 198 areas of partial compliance

• Supporting source locations for each finding

• A structured review that a qualified human could approve, reject or override

The complete analysis was produced in approximately 15 minutes.

Why It Matters

Design standards have limited value if they cannot be applied consistently across every capital project.

Core Runway allows owners to systematically compare project documentation against their own requirements while keeping the final decision in the hands of experienced reviewers.

Over time, those decisions, interpretations and approved exceptions can become institutional knowledge available to future projects.

The Outcome

Instead of relying on manual comparison, institutional memory and precedent from previous specifications, Core Runway creates a repeatable standards-review process that can operate at the scale of real construction projects.

Thousands of rules. Thousands of pages. One source-linked review.