Recommendations for BIM in Tunnelling

The German Tunnelling Committee (DAUB) has published its recommendations.

DAUB, who published the report this month, work on the development and standardization of techniques in underground construction both on and off site.

The paper seems to have emerged at the right time with Norway's $47BN coastal highway project, which is the largest infrastructure project in Norway's history, now underway.

Norway plan to use ground breaking engineering solutions including the world's largest and deepest undersea tunnel and various underground junctions, combined with tunnels that will also go through and across some of the worlds largest fjords. 

The paper also covers recommendations for ground modelling, using the ground underneath London as an example: "The ground-structure-process interaction is so important in tunnelling that the recording of ground conditions is distinguished with its own use case in the course of surveying the existing situation."

Another aspect, which no research can overlook today, is its use for post project operation and management. With the need and demand for digital twins every day, it's crucial that we are all both a) providing relevant and accurate data, and b) executing this the right way, being clear on the terminology and the best practice on how clients should handle the data with individual day-to-day FM operations. 

The report recommends: "From the point of view of the operator, the digital model should provide the following improvements: 

• Ensure fully up-to-date as-built documentation.
• Quicker recording of the actual state of the facility and model-based representation of the actual state (fibre optic sensing, laser scans, etc.) with georeferencing.
• Enable optimised maintenance over the entire facility portfolio thanks to considerably better information and uniform data structure.
• Enabling systematic and comprehensive analyses using selected criteria (e.g. product-specific search for installations).
• Simulation of constructional effects on running operations in case further construction works have to be carried out with continued operation."

Click here to read DAUB's paper in full.