Why You Should Use BIM for Road Building Projects
Date Posted: November 7, 2019
Posted In: Ideas,
From For Construction Pros: Transforming transportation project design and delivery to smart, paperless, 3D electronic delivery presents significant challenges that will take years to conquer. Yet the urgency is clear; the need for transportation infrastructure improvements is increasing while public funding decreases, requiring states and agencies to “do more with less.” Innovation is one potential answer.
Most construction companies have heard or Building Information Modeling or BIM. BIM is known as intelligent 3D model-based process that gives architecture, engineering and construction professionals the insight and tools to more efficiently plan, design, construct and manage buildings and infrastructure.
While there are many success stories of using BIM for the vertical environment (think buildings, bridges, structures, etc), there are far fewer cases for using BIM in what is known as the horizontal environment for our roadways. To date (with a few exceptions around the U.S.), BIM implementations are done largely because a bid required it and not because a contractor saw value in its use. Early adopters trend toward “lonely BIM,” where processes are isolated without a supporting BIM execution plan or cohesive strategy throughout the project duration.
However, in order to advance our current way of building roads we need to improve innovation, reduce construction risks and map out the whole life cycle of the asset and BIM can help.
BIM for Roadways Can:
- Provide a digital representation of the physical and functional characteristics of an infrastructure asset
- Aids in the process of developing a precise. data rich, virtual 3D representation of existing and proposed elements belonging to programmed construction projects
- Serve as a shared knowledge resource for information about the infrastructure asset
- Provides collaboration for various stakeholders at different phases of the life cycle of an infrastructure asset
“Communication is even more crucial today than it’s ever been but most engineers are unfortunately lousy at it,” Tony Nieves, construction engineer at the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) says. “All these new technologies are bringing tons of data but unfortunately at the project ownership level, it’s creating cycles of data that are not speaking with each other. What BIM does is creates a seamless transition for the data by breaking down the silos between teams.”