Prompt Engineering Academy

BIM and civil engineers

                    Implementing a BIM process for road and highway design starts with the creation of coordinated, reliable design information about the project. This results in an intelligent 3-D model of the roadway in which elements of the design are related to each other dynamically – not just points, surfaces, and alignments, but a rich set of information and the attributes associated with it.

For example, halfway through a roadway design project the profile may need adjustments to a vertical curve and the grades. By adjusting the profile, all of the related design elements update automatically, allowing the designer to instantly see the impact to cut and fill and right of way.

In this way, BIM facilitates evaluation of many more design alternatives. As part of the design process, civil engineers can leverage the information model to conduct simulation and analysis to optimise the design for constructability, sustainability and road safety. Finally, with a BIM process, design deliverable's can be created directly from the information model. Deliverable's include not only 2D construction documentation, but also the model itself and all the rich information it contains, which can be leveraged for quantity take-off, construction sequencing, as-built comparisons and even operations and maintenance. 

The use of modelling, 3-D visualisation and analysis is nothing new for road and highway design professionals, but with traditional drafting-centric approaches, design, analysis, and documentation become disconnected processes, making evaluation of what-if scenarios inefficient and cost prohibitive. By dynamically connecting design, analysis, and documentation in a BIM workflow, most of the effort in a roadway design project is shifted back into the detailed design phase when the ability to impact project performance is high and the cost of making design changes is low. This allows engineers to spend more time evaluating what-if scenarios to optimise the design and less time generating construction documentation.