Composition of design documentation under DBN A.2.2-3: sections, working documentation, what a steel structures designer needs

Input data and the design brief

A design starts not with drawings but with data from the customer. It includes an extract of the town-planning documentation with the general plan, data for the organisation of construction and for the estimate, and for industrial facilities also the product range, the production programme and technical specifications for equipment with a long manufacturing cycle. The list of input data is agreed when the contract for each design stage is signed.

For reconstruction, major repair and technical re-equipment, reports with conclusions of the survey of building structures, measured drawings, process layouts of the working shops and a list of existing buildings and lifting equipment that can be used during the work are added. For a steel frame this is the most important part: without a survey you do not know what the new structure rests on. On surveys see the article Diagnostics and condition assessment and the technical inspection service.

From these data the customer draws up the design brief, which the customer approves and the designer agrees. It records, among other things, the number of design stages and which stage is approved, the consequence class and complexity category of the facility, special construction conditions (seismicity, subsiding soils, undermined territories), requirements for fire protection, safety and labour protection, and the list of buildings and structures of the complex. The content of the brief can be varied to suit the particular project.

What sections make up the design of an industrial facility

The standard describes the composition of the design separately for non-industrial facilities and for industrial and linear engineering and transport infrastructure facilities. For steel-framed buildings the second part is usually the more relevant. Below are the sections where the designer of steel structures takes input data or supplies their own.

What of the steel structures gets into the design

For steel the main section is the architectural and construction solutions. It describes and justifies the adopted solutions, gives erection schemes, responsibility categories of structures and their elements, calculations of the main load-bearing elements and the principal structural scheme with materials and characteristics of the load-bearing structures.

The main drawings of the section are foundation layout schemes, floor plans, sections and elevations of the buildings with a schematic depiction of the load-bearing and enclosing structures, and the main joints of structural elements. This is the level at which KM lives in a design: enough to determine metal quantities and cost, but still without a split into shipping marks and parts.

Nothing is fabricated at this level. Fabrication needs the working documentation.

Working documentation

The standard builds working documentation from several parts. The core is the working drawings, which are grouped into main sets by mark: among them KM, KMD, reinforced concrete structures, anticorrosion protection and others. Alongside come specifications, questionnaires, the estimate and sketches of non-standard products.

The standard treats the composition of working documentation as indicative: it can be refined and supplemented. In practice the composition of the KM and KMD sets passed to the fabricator is set by the design brief and the contract.

Changes of standards during design

Design documentation is prepared with allowance for all building standards in force at the time it is handed over to production. For documentation already approved the rule is: it is not revised because new standards come into force, except where the new standards raise safety requirements, in particular for mechanical resistance and stability, electrical, explosion and fire safety, or accessibility for people with limited mobility. In those cases building work is needed.

It is worth relying on this rule when a customer brings drawings several years old: the question is not whether the standards have changed but whether the safety requirements have, and whether it can be shown that changes cannot be avoided. The decision is made by the designer, not the fabricator.

Design can proceed by construction phases and start-up complexes if the brief says so. In that case the documentation of the first stage is prepared for the facility as a whole, with phases and complexes singled out, and each phase needs sanitary and welfare conditions, fire safety, labour protection and environmental protection. For a fabricator this means the KMD set is often issued in parts by phase.

Author supervision and changes during fabrication

After the documentation is handed over to production, the designer usually carries out author supervision of construction under a contract with the customer. The supervision watches that the technical solutions match the approved design and records deviations from it in a journal. Changes to the drawings themselves are not made by such an entry: they are made under the rules for amending design documentation.

For a fabricator a simple practice follows. If during fabrication it turns out that a joint cannot be made as drawn or a section has to be replaced, the decision is issued as a change to the KMD and agreed with the author of the KM, and not fixed on the spot. Then both the supervision and the customer can see what was changed.

What we do in this scheme

Our line is KM and KMD drawings, fabrication of steel structures to the customer’s drawings and technical inspection. The other sections of the design (general plan, process part, estimate) are done by the general designer of the facility. To start KM or KMD we need the design brief or input data, the loads from equipment and layout schemes, and for reconstruction also the survey report.

Links: KM and KMD design, steel fabrication, technical inspection. The composition of the KM and KMD sets is described in the articles KM and KMD stages, KM drawings and KMD drawings. Erection on site is done by our partner construction company.

Standards and validity

• DBN A.2.2-3:2014 «Composition and content of design documentation for construction» with Amendments No. 1 and No. 2: stages, composition of the design sections and of the working documentation, input data and the design brief. As of October 2026 the document is listed as in force in the consolidated edition. Its validity and current edition need to be checked; in the original 2014 text the stages depended on the complexity category of the facility, and in the amended edition on the consequence class, so the consolidated text is used for work.
• DSTU 9243.4:2023 «System of design documentation for construction. Basic requirements for design documentation»: in force from 1 April 2024. Its validity and current edition need to be checked.
• DSTU 9286:2024 «Rules for the preparation of design and working documentation for metal building structures» and DBN V.1.2-14:2018 «General principles of reliability and structural safety of buildings and structures» (consequence class). Their validity and current edition need to be checked.

The procedure for author supervision is set by the current regulations and the contract; their validity has to be checked separately before the contract is signed.