The BIM-enabled geotechnical information management of a construction project

Abstract

For the convenience of collaborative design, virtual construction, construction process simulation and management, Building Information Modeling (BIM) is becoming an important tool in civil engineering. The current BIM team seems to neglect the geotechnical aspect of the model, which can result in costly mistakes, especially when the project is infrastructure based. The barrier between the BIM team and the geotechnical data provider is the difficulty in extracting and assimilating data from the archived geotechnical data, which is mainly in the form of geotechnical investigation reports and geological sections. Furthermore, the geotechnical data exposed from the construction can not be linked to the original data conveniently to correct the interpretated errors in the geotechnical data, and the monitoring data cannot be combined with the original geotechnical data to find the development trend of the monitoring variables. All of this indicates that current management strategy of geotechnical data should be improved upon. Therefore, a management strategy that focuses on the full life cycle management of geotechnical data together with the BIM model to improve the accuracy of decision making in the design, construction, operation and management stages of a construction project is particularly important. In this paper, we put forward a management strategy of geotechnical data that can help to integrate geotechnical information into the BIM of a construction project in order to realize the full life cycle management of geotechnical information. In this strategy, the geotechnical data from the geotechnical investigation is archived in the form of a centralized geotechnical database and an informative geotechnical model. The centralized geotechnical database is targeted to manage the factual data, base data, result data, and metadata. The informative geotechnical model can facilitate the geotechnical being used in the three-dimensional visualization environment where the collaborative design and virtual construction are accomplished. We discuss the specific workflow of building a centralized geotechnical database and an informative geotechnical model. Finally, we use the management of the geotechnical data in a hydropower station for experimental studies to verify the proposed management strategy. The result shows that it is advantageous to manage the geotechnical data in the proposed management strategy for the BIM of a construction project.