Improving the Efficiency of Road Construction Projects through Building Information Modeling (BIM) for Infrastructure

Infrastructure projects, particularly road development, are critical and substantial financial investments in modern societies. Consequently, industry and academia collaborate to advance the methodologies in designing and implementing such projects, leveraging contemporary technologies such as building information modeling (BIM). However, the use of BIM in road projects faces several barriers, such as inefficiencies in checking models. To address that, in this paper, the authors developed a new BIM-based model checking method for road projects, based on invariant signatures of architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) objects and industry foundation classes (IFC) standards. The focus is on two primary categories: pavement and drainage. Due to the inherent difficulties of ensuring quality assurance (QA) in the IFC model, the developed BIM-based workflow aims to establish a systematic QA approach and tool for identifying distinct components within road projects implemented in the IFC format, which offers several advantages. Firstly, it provides comprehensive information regarding the geometry and components of the project, thereby reducing the likelihood of errors and enhancing the effectiveness of conveying the design solution. Secondly, BIM facilitates visualization and virtual representation of the drainage and pavement works, enabling automatic detection and classification of road assets. Lastly, utilizing clash detection within the BIM workflow effectively resolves coordination issues that may arise during the project. The research findings contribute to optimizing time and cost management and enhancing project performance for designers and decision-makers involved in road projects by utilizing BIM and IFC throughout the whole life cycle of such projects.