Thanks to the innovative approach and good cooperation between the project stakeholders, the Randselva Bridge project has won The Best BIM Project & Best Infrastructure Project in 2020 by Tekla Global Building Information Modeling (BIM) Awards. The project has been opened in July 2022.

The implementation process

As long as you know the output of the model involvement in each part of the construction phase, then you are able to develop the BIM Model more and in a better way. The pilot project is always kind of learning by doing and the second BIM project should be the one where the real return of an investment will appear in a visible way. There are many rules to be kept and they are created very often when the BIM model is in use and technical problems occur. In general, it is proposed to focus on collaboration and communication issues first. That makes people able to notice what is missing and collect that data for further development of the virtual construction model. The implementation is an ongoing process and the BIM methodology could be used in many ways but everything takes time. From the project team experience that is very important to pay attention to basic rules step by step. Even 5D implementation will never work if you are not able to set a good foundation of teamwork and the use of the BIM model.

BIM models should be developed in close cooperation with contractor, suppliers and designer, for collecting and modeling the right data for usable purposes in the IFC files. When one compares the first model with the actual one, there is a significant difference and much more understandable division of data by the end of the project. The same can be said about the ways how one can explore or find the required information. The model is not about the amount of data but about smart assigning only those which are the most relevant for all the parties on the project.

Challenges

Drawingless projects improve a lot of traditional workflows and ways of transferring information between involved participants in a project. There are however some challenges to this method of working, and the main ones are:

• BIM-models contain a lot of information. Without good software and good ways of filtering data, it is hard to extract the needed data.
• How long will the IFC-format exist? Will future users of the BIM-model be able to read the data and how are digital links to connected documents maintained?
• In a BIM-model, informing the user about revised or added objects are easily done by adding UDA-information to the object. Informing the user about deleted objects are however more difficult, as there is no longer an object to attach the UDA-information to. So far, the mediocre solution to this problem is creating a revision log.
• Presenting tables of information in a BIM-model is hard. So far, this is normally solved by adding links to documents.
• In a drawing, a reinforcement concept valid for multiple similar construction elements (like piers) can be presented and is easily controlled. In a BIM-model, however, all reinforcement for all elements has to be present in the model, making modeling and control more laborious.
• In a drawing, a flexible concept can easily be presented. An example of this are piles (shown with break lines) set on top of bedrock, even though the level of the bedrock is unknown. This type of flexible design concept is hard to communicate in a BIM-model.
• Weather conditions like snow and rain make the use of digital tools like Ipads harder. 3D views with needed information can be printed and laminated, but it takes time to prepare these views, and extraction of relevant information still needs to be improved.
• Software is still not optimized to easily prepare and present section views from BIM-models with relevant information.

Conclusions

The progress of the Randselva bridge project and many similar drawingless projects in Norway show that building large and complex structures solely based on BIM-models is not only possible but often also a preferred way of working.

Randselva is currently the longest bridge in the world being built without drawings. Engineers from Sweco and Armando Rito Engenharia are however hoping the world record will be broken by other companies sooner rather than later. The competition is welcomed, as this will create new and alternative ways of working, that will be more efficient. Drawingless design is still in its infancy and it will be interesting to see how the industry solves the challenges that were encountered on the Randselva Bridge project.

Picture: A pier in axis 3

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