BIM - Where does rail fit in?

Ivan Hurst My thoughts 14 October 2023

BIM - Where does rail fit in?

[Published in Civil Engineering Surveyor (CES) on Feb 2013]

Title changed and published as a letter to the Editor, with agreement.

Information Flow, Management and Modelling

Is BIM bigger than Latham? Follow up

Introduction

I have been asked questions about Information Flow, Management and Modelling (IFMaM) and Building Information Modelling (BIM). Currently they resolve into three or four (depending on how you count) core questions;

How will BIM impact upon the railways,
Who should own the model,
Are there opportunities to set up BIM consultancies,
What will happen to Quantity Surveyors?

These are all very valid and interesting questions which I will attempt to answer, from my own perspective.

How will BIM impact upon the railways?

This question is also put as ‘Will BIM have any significance in the railways?’ I will fuse them to make ‘Will BIM have any significance in the railways, and if so what impact will it have?’ Asking around, I have found that there is little appreciation of BIM in the railway environment generally. It seems to be business as usual. However, being a consultant has some advantages. I am able to see lots of different sides of the industry, from Designer, Contractor, and Client, and get a feel for things that I would otherwise have no knowledge of. I am therefore aware of some of the things going on in the background, which, in this instance, I do not consider to be indiscreet to share with you.

I am very impressed with the efforts London Underground has adopted for the implementation of BIM. It has a dated and budgeted change management programme which has dedicated resources. Those resources are implementing the change to, and adoption of BIM in a controlled and professional manner with due regard for the Government’s requirements of 2016.

I have less information about Network Rail but believe they have a dedicated Director and BIM managers on the major programmes. I am aware that the London Bridge Station Redevelopment has a BIM requirement and that there have been some discussions about undertaking a full 3D survey of Waterloo Station.

So, whilst there may not be a lot of impact on the ground yet, I believe that it will become a lot more prevalent very soon. When it does, I think it will be part of an integrated solution. Not just BIM as a standalone product, just there to be compliant with the government’s requirement for a maturity level 2 by 2016.

Let me reminisce for a while. During the late 1990’s and into the start of 2000’s there were a number of initiatives that I was fortunate enough to be involved with, generally as a committee member. Thinking back, the first of any relevance was the Y2K programme. This started out as being part of the preparations for the ‘millennium bug’. It also included a review of all of Railtrack’s Access databases and data holding Spreadsheets. These were catalogued, reviewed, and categorised into Business Critical, Business Significant, and another, the name of which escapes me at the moment, followed by ‘not required’. A lot of duplication was found, even at Business Critical level. Corporate risk was reduced by identifying the Business Critical and Significant data depositories and actively managing them. Efficiencies were gained by comparing the duplicate solutions and picking the best practice example and adopting it, or occasionally combining a number of solutions to provide the best single solution. The result was the adoption of single solutions across the company with dedicated management to ensure the robustness (reliability and availability) of the BC&BS products.

A further development of the Y2K was the rationalisation of the asset databases. I sat on the signalling committee. There the structure and codification of the signalling asset was set. The red lens connects to the signal head, the signal post, the cabling, etc, to the control centre or signal box. The same happened for all of the asset categories.

Control and regularisation of data was taking on greater importance than previously.

There may be a few readers that remember the RAR programme. This was the ambitious linking of video to information. At the time it was stretching the capability of the computers, with special kiosks for viewing the output, as the ordinary desktop computers could not handle the data flows. Consider the Great Western Main Line. A special train was fitted with multiple video cameras, forward and side facing on the cab. The train travelled the line and the images processed as video and 3D images. Where available this was augmented with aerial views taken by helicopters following the line searching for equipment hot spots, in a similar fashion to the same process used for National Grid power lines. At the same time Railtrack did a deal with Ordnance Survey regarding the sharing of data. The videos were superimposed onto the relevant map tiles, and connected to the asset database. The result was that you could watch the video, see a piece of equipment at the side of the track, pause the video and find out about the location and details of that asset without leaving the office. Also you could look at a map, and zoom in to a specific location until you could see the assets, their details and the associated video, 3D image, and any photos.

Shortly after RAR, I was involved in RAMP. RAMP was the Railtrack Asset Management Programme. RAMP was a huge change management programme with a budget to match its aspirations. It was about creating the decision making tools of the future. More evidence based and less intuition. As such, part of it was to do with knowledge management and part the management of information. The establishment of MIMS (trade name; Mincom Information Management System rebadged as Maintenance Information Management System for UK railways) as the core Rail Infrastructure Asset Register.

http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmtran/145/14505.htm

Both the Railtrack Chairman and Tom Windsor, the then Rail Regulator visited the team at King’s Cross Eastside Offices, prior to the change of licence instigated by the Rail Regulator in April 2001.

The adoption of MIMS and the associated task based workflow management ultimately led to Maintenance being taken ‘in house’ by Network Rail’ some years later. RAMP also initiated the change from PMCS, Railtrack’s bespoke financial reporting software, to Oracle.

I could go on reminiscing, but I think suffice to say that there has long been an appetite within the rail industry for information management. An appetite which it is not always given credit for. I also have more recent examples in both London Underground and contracting organisations.

So, back to the question, ‘Will BIM have any significance in the railways, and if so what impact will it have?’ Yes indubitably. It cannot fail to have significance. BIM is such an integral part of the information management ethos that the industry recognises as important, and strives to achieve, that it becomes a natural fit. And what impact will it have? It will aid the expressed ambition for collaboration. It will aid efficiency in both preconstruction and maintenance. It will ultimately cut costs. There will be fundamental changes in the interaction between the client and the supply chain, which will also extend to a lesser extent into other stakeholders. As adoption accelerates, it will have a tendency to reduce the silo effect and provide better integration between asset groups.

The future may be a single network which can be considered, modelled, and managed as a single integrated interacting complex system as opposed to discrete elements whose reliance’s and interactions have to be guessed by experience or calculated outside of the knowledge management system. By that time we are into ‘Big Data’, and a brave new world.

BIM - Where does rail fit in?