Abstract:
Infrastructure is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “the basic physical and organisational
structures and facilities (e.g., buildings, roads, power supplies) needed for the operation of
a society or enterprise”. Roads form an integral part of civil infrastructure, providing safe
and reliable access from a point of origin to a destination. By the year 2050, Africa is
projected to have the highest urban population growth of 3.1%, with the United Nations
(UN) predicting the number of people on our planet to grow to nearly 10 billion. The civil
infrastructure industry must look to smarter, more efficient ways for infrastructure
provision, not purely based on population dynamics but also on the smarter utilisation of
land and resources. The gold standard for civil infrastructure is that which increases the
quality of life whilst fulfilling its function and design life in the most economical, sustainable,
and resilient way possible. This is not the norm in the civil industry today, as projects do
not see out their design life due to increased design complexity, which in turn results in
design errors, which then have a domino effect throughout the project lifecycle, impacting
project management, deadlines, deliverables, economy, sustainability, and optimal
infrastructure delivery. This poses the opportunity for exploring alternative, newer, faster,
leaner, and more innovative methods to tackle road projects, with one potential alternative
being building information modelling (BIM). This paper provides a high-level overview of
the innovation derived from wielding BIM technologies, workflows, and processes in the
road infrastructure industry.
