GIS-BIM Interoperability for Regeneration of Transurban Areas

In order to manage analysis and project processes at a territorial, urban and architectural scale, linking information to metric data is an increasingly important topic. At a geographic and cartographic stage, the function of storing, managing and viewing data and information is performed by GIS (Geographic Information Systems), where vector features as points, lines, polygons are gathered in layers connected to an attribute table. In a similar way, when scale factor increases, for buildings and other engineering works there is a growing necessity to preserve data or attributes together with the features where they belong. For this purpose, a major role is played by BIM (Building Information Modeling), a modelling process in which the parts of a building are hierarchically organized and every feature is connected to an information table containing all data useful for the ongoing working process or for managing the life cycle of the modelled building or infrastructure. While the two systems are similar in concept, at the moment they suffer lack of mutual communication, especially in conveying informations from a platform to another. Studying relationships and possible connections between different data storage environments like GIS and BIM is one of the research topics of DATA – Developing Abandoned Transurban Areas, a research project now in progress at University of Padova, involving Departments of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering and Industrial Engineering. The main goal of the project is to design pilot regeneration scenarios for wasted or underused places, focusing on a part of the western peri-urban area of Padova marked by the overlapping of partially abandoned industrial or commercial buildings, transport infrastructures like a ring road and a railway, residential fabric and green or agricultural land. Among DATA key features there is a multi-scale approach: in a framework where urban peripheries are considered a relation system between a city and the surrounding territory, the project aims to combine the methods of urban and territorial analysis with a design concept in which industrial landmarks or empty spaces become the core of possible urban transformations. Therefore, starting from data mining and management related to the areas of interest, procedures for GIS to BIM data transfer are surveyed and implemented; then, the buildings, facilities and building complex involved in scenarios design will be modelled in detail, and relevant building-scale information will be added. At the moment, within the project, a pipeline to convert a GIS map of the buildings in our area of interest into a BIM 3D model provided with all the information of the GIS layer has been developed. Then, when the BIM model is modified, its updated attributes can be taken back to the GIS level. The aim of this paper is to describe the workflow for GIS-BIM interoperability in DATA project, results achieved at the moment and future goals and applications.