Building information Modelling (BIM) application for an existing road infrastructure

New technologies are changing the sector of infrastructures design and construction. One of the most important is the I-BIM (Infrastructure Building Information Modelling), that is a management information system of digital processes for infrastructures. In this study the I-BIM approach has been used for the upgrade of a section of the SS 245 road, in the north of Italy, in order to show its benefits applied on existing road infrastructure. The project involved the design of a new road segment and its connection with the existing road network and with a railway line. These last were respectively solved by a roundabout and by a jacked tunnel under the railroad with wing walls at each exit side of the structure. The steps carried out in this study were modelling the 3D digital terrain model from point cloud; creating the horizontal alignment, vertical profiles and editing cross-sections; modelling the jacked tunnel; creating the roundabout; generating the 3D parametric model of the complete road and visualizing the infrastructure in the real-world context. The real innovation consists in the creation of a plugin that allows extrapolating directly from the design program to the compute one, all the features need to be calculated. The BIM tools used were “Autodesk AutoCAD Civil 3D” and “Revit Structure”, used respectively for road geometrical design and for tunnel structural project. The obtained results have been showed that the I-BIM approach represents not only a powerful tool to optimize and validate the road project according to norms before its construction, but also to see how the infrastructure works with the 3D real environmental context.