Project management and life-cycle cost evaluation using infrastructure-building information modeling techniques: A railway infrastructure design case study

Building Information Modeling has reached a certain level of maturity in the field of vertical constructions, but it is still in an initial phase in the field of horizontal ones as transport infrastructures. This is due to the lack of a proper format for data interchange, capable of representing all the peculiarities of such constructions, like the wide extension of the model over a surface and its very heterogeneous components. In recent years, this gap has been partially bridged with the development of the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) format for different categories of transport infrastructures, as also for the railway infrastructure sector. The goal of this work is to assess the maturity of the available tools and the difficulties concerning the project management of transport infrastructures using Building Information Modeling software in the design phase with special attention to interoperability of the data. The authors focused their attention on the identification of a new railway layout in Italy (Padua - Chioggia connection), through the implementation of an information flow between different software tools to test the information exchange and the export of data in the IFC 4x3 standard format. Starting from the definition of the territorial constraints, the geometric parameters, the unit costs and the railway service of the project, a set of design alternatives was generated. Through the railway line life-cycle cost and a decision-making analysis, the optimal solution was identified among the various track layouts. The several issues related to different software packages demonstrate that the information exchange for horizontal constructions is still far from reaching a good degree of maturity, especially regarding the lack of a univocal transfer of information. To spread the Building Information Modeling methodology as a standard for infrastructure design, it is required to overcome these technical obstacles to get a collaborative work process.