An Agentic AI System for Roof Design Compliance Using Computer Vision, Retrieval-Augmented Generation and Large Language Models

Designers, engineers, and building officials face increasing pressure to accelerate and improve the accuracy of design review for buildings and infrastructure. Roof assemblies and rooftop structures are particularly challenging due to the complexity and fragmentation of regulatory requirements, especially in jurisdictions such as Florida, where compliance must be verified across both the residential and commercial volumes of the Florida Building Code (FBC). The resulting review process is technically demanding and time-intensive, imposing significant cognitive and operational burdens on practitioners and under-resourced public agencies. To address these challenges, this study proposes and evaluates an agentic artificial intelligence (AI) framework for automated code compliance checking of roof assemblies and rooftop structures. The framework employs a multi-agent architecture in which specialized AI agents collaboratively interpret regulatory provisions and evaluate roof design parameters across four core modules: data preprocessing and code ingestion, rule-based and semantic analysis, results visualization, and iterative validation. YOLO11m-seg and Mask R-CNN were used for element detection and segmentation, and the system was developed using 150 design projects, including roof plans, section details, and specifications. Four large language models from two families (Mistral and GPT) were comparatively evaluated on standardized compliance tasks. The framework was then tested on a held-out portfolio of 15 distinct roof-design projects comprising 60 code-compliance decisions derived from the FBC 2023, with performance measured by precision, recall, F1-score, and accuracy. GPT-5.4 achieved the highest overall performance (F1 = 0.97; accuracy = 97%). Because the reasoning and vision components were evaluated separately rather than as an integrated end-to-end pipeline, and the scope was limited to one jurisdiction and two drawing types, broader code coverage and production-setting validation are needed before claims of generality. Nonetheless, the results suggest that agentic AI can meaningfully support compliance review and reduce reviewer burden in roof-design permitting.