Abstract
The increase in population and urbanization needs attention towards intense construction activities to meet the social and economic needs. Soil excavation is a primary step in every construction project that needs proper surface and subsurface information modeling since it is vulnerable to construction hazards. Geographic information system (GIS) provides significant information about the existing contextual surface information while building information modeling (BIM) gives information about the asset in a great detail that has been integrated into the construction industry for many applications. However, the integration of BIM and GIS for the subsurface geotechnical property modeling and classification into zones has been rarely explored. This paper presents the integration of BIM and GIS for modeling geotechnical properties and safe construction zones based on soil type. The use of open standard IFC classes such as IfcBorehole, IfcGeoslice, and IfcGeomodel enhances the collaboration and allows the exchange of geotechnical information among different stakeholders. The method has been applied to the in-situ and laboratory test dataset of the Peshawar, region, to validate the proof of concept. The results demonstrate that the proposed method successfully integrates BIM and GIS providing a three-dimensional surface and subsurface model. The 3D digital geotechnical model has excellent potential to provide information about soil type, properties, depth, and volume of each available soil layer that can be used by construction planners and managers to identify best construction practices and plan for safe construction.
Highlights
An application of building information modeling (BIM) and Geographic information system (GIS) integration is expected for geotechnical property modeling to identify best practices for construction management and safety
Even though the integration supports the visualization of the contextual GIS information in the BIM environment, its application for the geotechnical parameters modeling and classification into different zones was not explored
This paper presents the BIM and GIS integration for geotechnical parameter modeling, mapping, visualization, and the estimation of soil volume
Summary
Urbanization in the world is continuously increasing over the last century. Urbanization is considered the growth of the population towards cities or suburbs. Many studies have utilized geographic information system (GIS) to model, map, integrate, and interpret the geotechnical properties of the site portraying their spatial distribution [10,14]. The integration of GIS and geotechnical parameters is essential considering spatial correlation to build and provide digital maps and safety zonation. Advance data visualization tools such as building information modeling (BIM) can be used in integration with GIS to facilitate the management, 3D modeling, and visualization of the geotechnical models [4]. The integration of BIM-GIS domains is widely acknowledged to be a beneficial and crucial step forward towards detailed geotechnical modeling and construction safety zoning. Class (IFC) is considered to be an open standard format for exchanging graphical and 3D semantic information for BIM [28,39] It has an objected-oriented hierarchy containing geometry information with predefined attributes and relationships. Some of the previous research on the integration of BIM and GIS has been reviewed in the subsection
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