Overview
Through electrification and digitization, productivity in industrial production has risen by almost thirty percent from 1995 to 2005. In the construction sector, on the other hand, growth has stagnated for years. That is why many projects are characterized by massive price pressure on the part of the contractors by delays, cost overruns and the resultant poor quality. These problems cannot be solved individually but must be solved holistically by improving the overall construction process. Building Information Modelling (BIM) could be the long-term opportunity to improve the current problems by increasing the planning accuracy and cost-security and by optimizing the costs in the lifecycle, and to give Austrian companies a market advantage in times of globalization and digitization. This is because BIM covers the entire life cycle of a construction project and involves all project partners from the client through the planners and the executing companies to the facility managers in a collaborative and transparent process.
In this project the focus will be on the development of traffic infrastructure data structures for BIM with the main focus on the necessary information for procurement and facility operation. In contrast to the building construction in the area of infrastructure, there is not yet a complete standardized data structure, and the fact that the developer of a project is mostly an operator in the infrastructure is a huge potential for innovation. If, subsequently, the data structure is set according to the time or the project phase, this corresponds to the so-called level of development (LOD) or the degree of development. This explains which elements or information a building model or model element must have in relation to the project phase. As a result, it will be possible for the client at the beginning of a project to define an end-to-end data chain from development through planning and construction to operation and back again and thus reduce the monetary loss from unwanted data breaks.
The development of objective data structures is developed by BIM and infrastructure experts from the various specialist disciplines by comparing the IFC Infrastructure Standardization Proposals, IFC Rail and Road, with the national requirements of the Austrian infrastructure operatorsÖBB and ASFINAG. Since these two IFC standardization proposals are still in the verification process, the identification of national requirements can still be introduced into standardization. For example, there are already very good data structures on the part of the ÖBB (System Directory, RailTopoModel) and ASFINAG (Technical Stock Documentation), which could be incorporated into this standardization. As a result, Austrian companies are greatly facilitated in the switch to an open BIM process and Austria’s position as a global business location is improved in these times of digitization and globalization.