IMPACT OF INFORMATION MANAGEMENT DURING DESIGN & CONSTRUCTION ON DOWNSTREAM BIM-GIS INTEROPERABILITY FOR RAIL INFRASTRUCTURE

Abstract. The need for efficient and sustainable infrastructure – always critical to a city – is further gaining momentum as urbanisation creates the challenge of sustainably designing, constructing and operating the built environment. The AECOO industry, directly responsible for addressing this challenge, has adopted the use of BIM and GIS to aid in this endeavour. Both BIM and GIS overlap with respect to capturing aspects of the built environment, but are not interoperable by nature. To ensure a consistent and structured way of managing the information produced within these environments, industry standards such as IFC are implemented. Research to date focuses on addressing the integration between BIM and GIS for buildings by delving into the IFC and CityGML interoperability, which has highlighted significant geometric and semantic barriers that in the stage of integration, cannot be easily manoeuvred. The purpose of this paper is to provide an insight regarding the information lifecycle during Design & Construction in the HS2 Rail Infrastructure project and investigate the impact of current information management processes – and in particular Standards such as IFC, – on BIM-GIS interoperability and lifecycle management of an asset. Results demonstrate the levels of mis mapping during the export to IFC which varies depending on the infrastructure asset type. Discussion shows that these can be addressed by the introduction of additional semantic property sets to facilitate downstream BIM-GIS interoperability for O & M, enabling scope for future work.