BIM for infrastructure: A spatial perspective to utility network management using BIM applications

Abstract

Technological researches continue to offer more and more new opportunities, which creates a variety of effects not only in the informatics sector but also in the agriculture, economy, health, education, and construction sectors. The production activities in the construction sector are gradually increasing; however, it has become an important problem to investigate the reason of low efficiency and high cost in the construction sector. Building information modeling provides various possibilities for the solution of these problems in the construction industry. Building information modeling offers a system management covering all the processes from the planning phase of the project to the operation and maintenance phase of the facility. Moreover, it provides the solution for coordination and collaboration problems at this stage as it offers 3D modeling opportunity in the project, especially at the design stage. It also provides a cost calculation analysis, clash detection, and project progress simulation. However, researches about the implementation of BIM applications mostly focus on the superstructure part of the construction. Therefore, the part related to infrastructure construction is more limited than superstructure construction. As for the infrastructure construction, researches on BIM applications are generally limited to the bridge, railway, and tunnel studies; therefore, research on utility infrastructure networks such as drainage, electricity, irrigation, and telecommunication studies is limited. Research on smart cities has been increasing recently. Smart cities include all of the superstructure and infrastructure systems; however, research on this is usually done on a base of buildings. Superstructure systems are constructed by the reference of infrastructure systems. For this reason, it can be thought that this study is an introduction to smart cities as it is the first step in the transition to smart cities. The main purpose of writing the thesis is to show how the process of BIM applications in the utility infrastructure works are done and to present researches for the solution to the problems encountered in this stage. In this process, the stages of BIM applications that will be used in infrastructure systems for the prevention of data loss, waste of time, rework and unnecessary expenses in the infrastructure sector are examined. Especially, by choosing the SDHO Project as a case study, it is indicated by transforming 2D IFC utility network drawings to 3D utility models.