BIM in Geotechnics - Application to Road and Railway Construction

Abstract

Road and railway projects are generally planned using special software packages, which allow the consideration of many boundary conditions. While such a planning software usually has the ability to generate and import information related to subsoil conditions (like soil layering or material parameters) it generally lacks the essential features to use this existing information for geotechnical analyses such as settlement predictions or investigations of the time - settlement behaviour. Therefore, embankment cross sections need to be transferred from the planning software to the geotechnical software to perform the required computations and finally the obtained results of these analyses need to be manually inserted into the planning software. The script discussed in this paper clearly shows the advantages of an information exchange tool, offering facilitated import, automatized model setup and custom-designable export files.