With the implementation of Building Information Management, or in Dutch Bouwwerk Informatie Management (BIM), which (generally) relates to virtual construction and digital collaboration between all project partners within a construction project, the Agency for Roads and Traffic (AWV) of the Flemish government is fully committed to the evolution towards a data-driven organisation. In doing so, AWV makes maximum use of modern digital methods and technologies to collect, manage and use correct, complete and up-to-date information about its assets. The 'assets' are the road infrastructure objects that AWV manages, maintains and operates: roads, cycle paths, tunnels, bridges and all peripheral infrastructure. BIM enables AWV to efficiently collect and manage all available information regarding its assets throughout their life cycle (study and design phase / construction and installation / management and maintenance / replacement or removal) in a central database. By collecting the asset's data once and exchanging them in a standardised way, these data can be made uniformly available to all parties involved at any time during the life cycle of the assets.
BIM is already widespread and well established in the building sector. Via ‘BIM 4 Infra’, AWV now also wants to roll out BIM in (road) infrastructure projects. As a public contracting authority, AWV does this by developing standardised tender documents, including BIM requirements in the contracts put out to tender, and by developing a (public) data standard: the Object Type Library or in Dutch ObjectTypenBibliotheek (OTL).
The OTL consists of three basic components:
- Object types: the ‘virtual’ counterparts of the assets in the ‘real’ environment;
- Attributes: the properties of the object types;
- Relationships: relations between object types.
When (further) developing the OTL information model, correctly typing the objects and adding properties to each object type poses few practical problems. Establishing relationships between object types, however, is much more complex. Within the framework of this PIP project, AWV is looking for a widely applicable relationship tool to create and manage semantic relationships between the assets, in accordance with the OTL. In this way, better and more complex analyses can be carried out on the asset's data in the 'virtual' copy, which should allow AWV to manage its assets more efficiently 'in real life', to exploit them more easily and (also) to maintain them predictively.
The envisaged relationship tool is not an isolated goal but an important link in the broader BIM and OTL story of AWV as an infrastructure manager and builder. AWV's information needs, of which relationships between assets (as object types defined in the OTL) are an essential part, are strongly focused on being able to (re)use all the collected information during the entire life cycle of an asset. This should enable AWV to better maintain the road infrastructure and to manage and operate it more efficiently, with all the associated benefits: more safety, less unexpected damage, better traffic flow, better and more well-founded multi-year plans for maintenance and investments, etc. This is all part of AWV's mission and vision: to work towards smooth, safe and sustainable mobility for all road users.
