Innovative road design with bim technologies : digitally transforming the way we create road infrastructure

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.