cost a lot to run, especially with rising gas and electricity prices. You can achieve one of the biggest cost savings for a built asset not by shaving off dollars from design fees or construction costs, but during use of the asset and its operational lifecycle. The largest cost is energy usage, so being able to model the carbon, thermal, and environmental strategy of a built asset and experiment with various options is hugely beneficial. Refer to Chapter 15 for more information.
Managing and maintaining the built asset
Another way to think of building the information model is that you need to embed all the information in the digital representation of the physical asset so that it can be managed and maintained in the long term. Focus on outcomes and what information you need later in the project’s life. No longer will a building come with 40 boxes of paper drawings and spares; it should have a digital model embedded with data and clear procurement information. In Chapter 17, you can find out about making BIM work for facility management (FM).
You still may not be sure whether BIM is right for your infrastructure project. Perhaps your project isn’t a traditional built asset, or it’s something on a gigantic macro-scale, or else it’s going to involve only a few teams working on just the early stage of concept design.
You need to ask yourself if BIM is going to work for your projects and if the potential efficiencies or savings are worth the investment and related change that will be required. Figure out how you would approach the project using traditional methods and compare this to using only digital data and coordinated BIM tools and platforms. The answer may come down to the size of the project, but even the smallest constructions can be made more efficient.
For example, if you’re developing a house extension, you may not implement full-scale BIM, but you can still improve your information exchanges with other team members. Don’t forget that in some projects BIM usage may be an actual requirement for involvement in the team.
Here are some examples of building and civil projects where BIM is still hardly off the ground:
✔ Projects at a scale thousands of miles in area: You need to break these down into a significant number of smaller lengths for most software platforms to cope, which results in complex coordination. Managing the impact of change in one area on its surroundings can be very tricky.
✔ Projects that are fundamentally two-dimensional: Some examples include track layout and design on national rail networks. Many industrial manufacturers, fabricators, and suppliers have a long way to go before providing 3D object-based information.
✔ Projects that involve the management of sites still in daily use: Examples include rail, road, and airport maintenance improvements with traffic management requirements. The urgency and complexity of these projects can make front-end time savings the priority, not long-term lifecycle benefits.
Looking at Infrastructure and BIM
BIM adoption has been slower among infrastructure and civil engineering professionals. Here’s a list of potential reasons:
✔ No real incentive to share information: The traditional “You do your bit, I’ll do mine” is still very common in civil and infrastructure work. Specialist subject areas are technically very complex.
✔ Perception that BIM may delay making site progress: Whereas it is obviously cost effective to design out a clash between pipework and an architectural element in a building project before getting on-site, on a highways project engineers see getting around these issues as standard activity. This is especially true when projects are urgent or working to very tight timescales. Infrastructure clients sometimes see designing out all the clashes ahead of time as inefficient when in fact it could save millions of dollars in the bigger picture.
✔ Lack of software designed to coordinate information at the scale of civil engineering projects: Tools and platforms exist with infrastructure in mind, but they’re generally targeted at one profession or discipline and for specific project sizes.
✔ Information standards are rare and not enforced in the majority of projects: A stalemate results, where teams just continue with existing processes and no overall management of the entire built asset exists. In simple terms, you need to ensure that the trains will fit in the stations.
Developing Building Processes and BIM
BIM isn’t just technology and it’s definitely not just software. BIM is a best-practice process and therefore can impact project management and procurement just like some methodology, such as PRINCE2 or Agile, may completely restructure the delivery of a computing project.
BIM has the potential to make the design process easier and more efficient. Basic benefits of digital modeling include the ability to check if one designer’s work clashes with another, being able to try lots of iterative designs out and fully understanding their impact, and better energy modeling and analysis.
✔ Clash detection: Projects that use BIM need the whole project team to work together, and each discipline will be developing a model in isolation. This can lead to coordination issues like overlapping systems or designs that can’t be built because of other components getting in the way.
