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Engineering a Chinese Superhighway with Connected BIM

$1 Billion Project In Mountainous Sichuan

Despite being only 37 km long, the 4-lane Panzhihua-Yanyuan highway project in China’s Sichuan province presents daunting engineering challenges with numerous tunnels and bridges through and over mountainous terrain, a large bridge over the Jinsha river, and a complex interchange with another major highway. Sichuan Transport Surveying & Design Institute (SCODI), the prime engineering contractor, used Autodesk model-based workflows to design all the highway elements including roadways, tunnels, bridges, interchanges, and more.

Meeting the Challenges

A highway project running through complex topography with a high tunnel ratio requires exemplary planning and design to reduce costly design changes while optimizing routes and keeping stakeholders informed and collaborating.

To achieve all these goals, SCODI used a variety of Autodesk^® software products on this project, including Autodesk^® InfraWorks^® 360, Autodesk^® AutoCAD^® Civil 3D^®, Autodesk^® Revit^®, Autodesk^® AutoCAD^® Raster Design, Autodesk^® Subassembly Composer, AutoCAD^® Map 3D, and Autodesk^® Navisworks^® Manage software.

The BIM Based Workflow

By combining aerial images with topographic data, SCODI created a virtual 3D model of the project area that it used to lay out proposed road alignments and add preliminary design details such as bridges, tunnels, and highway interchanges that were not just sketches but actual models with data that could be used in detailed design. This ability to design in the context of the surrounding topography gave SCODI engineers a more intuitive understanding of the engineering challenges and helped them optimize the highway design.

As a result, at the start of construction, officials are confident that the best highway would be built at the lowest possible cost and with the highest sustainability and lowest environmental impact.

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Previous FEATURES

Westside Bypass in Oregon
with Connected BIM

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Speed is Job One

The Westside Bypass in Oregon, first planned in the early 1980s, was envisioned as a high-speed beltway to solve Washington County's gridlock problems and pave the way for continued economic growth. It was a controversial project. Eventually, it was abandoned.

Today, the county's population growth is nearly twice that of the state as a whole and job growth is forecasted at 37%. The county has big goals, including opening access to burgeoning industrial areas, connecting southern residential areas to northern industrial areas and remaining sensitive to public sentiments against urban sprawl.
Altogether, the goals were a very tall order indeed.

Out of the Ashes

Winding through unincorporated county land between the cities of Tualatin and Sherwood, the 124th Avenue Extension Project is key to meeting Washington County's growth.

The project would impact many adjacent businesses and homeowners, attracting a lot of public attention. It was critical to show how this project would impact neighborhoods and what it would look like from the communities' backyards.

For public outreach, David Evans & Associates (DEA) started with project visualizations in the form of traditional 2D plan drawings and strip maps. For a non-technical audience, these types of visualizations were simply not effective.

“I'm not trying to overstate this or be melodramatic, but this is a huge deal for both us and, from a transportation standpoint, the most important thing to happen to Tualatin during my time here.”

- Lou Ogden, Tualatin Mayor (source)

Opportunity Knocks

DEA knew they were dealing with stakeholders that were engaged and vocal. With the project 75% complete, they realized that any visualizations they produced had to exactly reflect their design. They needed to go beyond 2D drawings.

DEA turned to InfraWorks 360 and Roadway Design for InfraWorks 360. With InfraWorks 360 they merged their own design data with publicly available digital terrain model, aerial photos, and GIS-based road and building data to generate a 3D model of their road design and the surroundings. With this 3D model, DEA produced compelling visuals —including high-resolution renderings and fly-through videos of each of the major roadways—for the public meetings.

This approach helped to clearly communicate DEA’s design to the community and other project stakeholders. It definitely helped the County move the public engagement process forward.

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“We spent thousands of dollars to create a CNC-machined raised-relief map of the project’s existing topography to help communicate our early designs. We even cut out little strips of paper and draped them over the relief map to represent different alternatives for the alignment. If we had used InfraWorks 360, we could have created scores of high-resolutions images and videos for all the various design alternatives we considered—with actual road design details such as tunnels, embankments, interchanges, road profiles, and drainage. That would have been a much better means of design communication.”

Daniel Iliyn
Civil Engineer, Roads & Highways
David Evans and Associates, Inc.

Building Big Down Under with Horizontal and Vertical BIM

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The North West Rail Link

With 8 new train stations, 4,000 commuter car parking spaces, and twin tunnels 15 kilometers long, the North West Rail Link—Australia’s first fully automated transit rail system—is a big project, a fact underscored by its AU$8.3 billion budget.

SMEC, an Australian professional services firm focused on major infrastructure, is leading the design effort on two key portions of the project: operations, trains, and systems and surface and viaduct civil work.

At every step of the process, BIM has been essential to the SMEC team.

No Room For Error

Projects of this size and complexity require farsighted management—and proactive attention to the smallest details. Everything from conduits to pipes to ducts needs to fit together during construction, and even relatively minor coordination issues could lead to delays and higher costs.

For SMEC, the solution lay in the integrated use of Autodesk^® tools including AutoCAD^®Civil 3D^®, Autdesk^® Revit^®, Autodesk^® Vault^® Professional, and Autodesk^® Navisworks^® Manage to enable a coordinated design process based on intelligent modeling. Various design models come together within a federated 3D model that resolves details and identifies clashes, to stay on budget while improving the design.

The BIM Based Workflow

SMEC's success using BIM in the North West Rail Link project has demonstrated the value of the BIM based workflow to the firm, and represents a transformational shift in the way that its future projects will be designed and managed. Armed with this capability, SMEC is ready to take on even bigger and more complex projects.

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“You generate a body of knowledge in BIM that can be used from project conception to decommissioning. As the project changes, you add the intelligence within the model to increase quality and save time and money at every stage of development.”

Neil Evans
Sichuan Transportation Design Institute of China

E16 with Connected BIM

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The E16

610 miles. The equivalent of 10,736 American Football fields. The E16 starts in Northern Ireland and ends in Sweden. In Norway, the E16 is 220 miles long and is the fastest route from Oslo to the western fjords.

Recently, Danish firm COWI started work on a four-lane, 20-mile addition to the E16 in Norway. It was the largest contract ever awarded by the Norwegian Public Roads Administration.

The Challenge

The E16 addition would encompass 20-miles, 4 lanes, 5 crossings, 3 bridges, and 15 flyovers. It would pass through a diverse landscape, including areas of unstable clay soil. So aside from its scope and length, COWI would need to address significant geotechnical concerns and flooding issues on this project.

To get started, COWI took enormous amounts of land, geology, flooding, natural resources, agriculture and forestry data from various sources and loaded the data into InfraWorks 360 to build a unified 3D model of the project.

The Eureka Moment

Along the way, the E16 project’s route changed. But, aided by the data integrated into the model, COWI was able to deliver realistic design alternatives to the client, on the fly. These visualizations also enabled involvement in the project from local government and the public in a major way.

Using InfraWorks 360 as part of their BIM process, decisions were better informed and could be made much more quickly.

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“Before InfraWorks 360, there wasn’t any feasible method of bringing together and visualizing existing condition information for large infrastructure projects. It has been a ‘eureka’ experience.”

Frode Geir Bjoervik
Project Director
COWI

Keeping a Complex Rail Project on Track

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A NEW LINK IN HONG KONG’S MASS TRANSIT RAILWAY

The Shatin to Central link, a 17 km railway line expansion for Hong Kong’s Mass Transit Railway (MTR), involves large-scale construction in one of the world’s most built-up and busiest commercial areas. The project includes 1.8 km of new twin railway tunnels, a new underground station with interchange facilities, plus ventilation buildings and shafts on Hong Kong Island

With its complexity and logistical challenges, the venture was just the sort of project that appealed to Arup, a worldwide design and engineering firm renowned for its engineering consultancy and professional services.

Keys To Success

The Shatin to Central link involved almost every engineering element to be found in a civil project: demolition and modification of existing structures, brand new construction, consideration for tying into existing or future infrastructure, and a wide scope of legal, safety, traffic, and business impact issues.

Armed with Autodesk BIM tools, the Arup team felt well prepared to meet any design parameter presented by MTR. What soon became apparent was that the keys to project success lay in close coordination and communication among the myriad stakeholders in the governmental, engineering, and construction sectors.

Plan, Detail, Simulate

IM enabled Arup designers to plan more accurately, with multiple stakeholders’ information imported to the model. Because BIM greatly improves constructability planning, significant time will be saved during the construction phase, with reduced abortive work and associated labor costs. And because the Arup team could vividly visualize and simulate their work through 3D modeling, everyone from MTR management to the general public could easily understand exactly how the finished rail link would look and work. Hong Kong commuters will appreciate these tangible benefits created by BIM for years to come.

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“BIM enables us to make critical decisions using data that can be easily visualized, so the team can find alternatives more effectively with a clear overview of the sequence of work for this highly complex project.”

Timothy Suen
Arup fellow and director of Railway in East Asia

$1 Billion Project In Mountainous Sichuan

Meeting the Challenges

The BIM Based Workflow

Previous FEATURES

Speed is Job One

Out of the Ashes

Opportunity Knocks

The North West Rail Link

No Room For Error

The BIM Based Workflow

The E16

The Challenge

The Eureka Moment

A NEW LINK IN HONG KONG’S MASS TRANSIT RAILWAY

Keys To Success

Plan, Detail, Simulate

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