Building Information Modeling in tunneling - digital design and construction of tunneling projects

The application of Building Information Modeling (BIM) in the field of infrastructure engineering is to be introduced and subsequently established in Germany by 2020. This includes the planning, production and operation of tunnel structures. In research and real projects, experiences concerning the application of the BIM methodology were collected over the last couple of years. As it turned out, the holistic introduction of BIM requires a detailed analysis of processes and project specific definition of reasonable use cases. Within the scope of this paper, current experiences and BIM use cases in the field of tunneling are discussed. The definition of a reasonable geometric and semantical level of detail for the specific use cases is exemplified. Following that, the implementation of a shared data interface, as well as the correlation and exchange of subject-specific models are described. Hereby, approaches based on linked data or multi model containers have proven to be especially suitable. Based on practical examples, several use cases and the associated project goals for the application of BIM are discussed.