GeoIgnite: Evidence of the benefits of an integrated BIM+geospatial approach to construction

I thought it would be worth while to include here the plenary talk I gave at GeoIgnite 2019 in Ottawa about the growing evidence of the benefits of an integrated BIM + geospatial approach to full-lifecycle construction. 

The UK government and others have stated clearly that they expect the largest benefits of BIM to flow from a full-lifecycle approach to construction.  As construction companies who have taken on design, build, operate and/or maintain projects have found, for full life-cycle construction projects an approach that combines BIM + geospatial significantly improves outcomes. Until the last year or two evidence of the benefits of BIM + geospatial from real world projects has not been available. Now we are beginning to see substantive data that offer evidence of the benefits of an integrated BIM+geospatial full lifecycle approach for construction projects.

Some owners have begun procuring using a design, build, maintain, and or operate model.   Engineering and construction companies who have undertaken these projects have reported significant business benefits from adopting an integrated BIM+geospatial approach to construction. Further evidence of the benefits of this approach is provided recently by the owner of a major $1.3 billion PPP construction project.  Nagpur Metro has estimated that it expects total savings in excess of US$225 million over the 25 year lifetime of a design-build-operate-maintain project.

In Canada construction contributes $137 billion, about 7 %, to the GDP annually. Construction in advanced economies have worldwide have a serious problem. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that the world will need to spend $57 trillion on infrastructure through 2030 to keep up with global GDP growth. This will require huge amounts of private investment from pension funds, insurance companies and sovereign wealth funds. To attract this money will require improvements in construction productivity, but in many of the world's advanced economies, construction productivity has been flat for the past 40 years. McKinsey reports that large construction projects typically take 20 percent longer to finish than scheduled and are up to 80 percent over budget. McKinsey & Company suggests that the construction industry is ripe for disruption and two of the technologies that it believes will be key in that anticipated transformation are geospatial and BIM. 

The UK Government as part of its building information modeling (BIM) initiative has said repeatedly that it expects the big payoff of a digital model will be during operations and maintenance, which typically represents 80% of the cost of a facility.  But to date there has been little uptake of this approach in the facilities management (FM) sector. A recent survey of the FM industry found that while 92% had heard about BIM and 84% agreed that BIM has the potential to deliver value add to FM, over two thirds said that the FM is not prepared for BIM.

The early adopters of a BIM+geospatial approach are companies who take on design, build, and maintain and/or operate projects, variously referred to as DBFM in the Netherlands, BOT in Southeast Asia, and PPP in Canada and India. Among these companies are some well-known names in global construction; Major construction firms have realized that BIM+geospatial integration provide greater value for full lifecycle projects. EllisDon, Parsons Brinckerhoff , Atkins Global , Arcadis , BAM and AECOM.

For example, in Canada In Canada public–private partnership (PPP) have been remarkably successful for building and maintaining infrastructure. 15 years ago EllisDon began taking on PPP projects and quickly recognized that an integrated BIM+geospatial simplified capturing and maintaining data over the full project lifecyle of a project. As a result Integrated BIM + geospatial has become a best practice on P3 projects at EllisDon.

Owners have found that BIM+geospatial integration provides greater value to projects that involve not just design and construction but also operations and maintenance. A leader in this space, Rijkswaterstaat, the Dutch transportation authority, began offering design-build-finance-maintain (DBFM) projects a number of years ago which has motivated private Dutch engineering and construction companies to adopt an integrated geospatial+BIM approach to construction. The firm Royal BAM Group nv/BAM Infraconsult adopted integrated BIM + geospatial because of market developments including more complex construction assignments and an increasing demand from customers for service provision throughout the entire life cycle of a project. This includes reality capture using LiDAR scanning at the beginning of the project, before design, to capture an acuurate representation of the location where construction will take place. During the design and build phases of the project everything captured is georeferenced so that it can be migrated to an integrated GIS+FM system for maintenance activities. 

The Crossrail project in London which was the largest engineering project in Europe at the time, adopted a full-lifecycle BIM+geospatial approach with targets of 20% savings on design and construction and 40% savings during operations and maintenance.

In Southeast Asia for a BOT (build-operate-transfer) substation expansion project won by Malaysian company PESTECH to design, build and operate the substation for 25 years. PESTECH adopted an integrated BIM+geospatial approach which included reality capture of the existing substation at the beginning of the project using LiDAR and georeferencing everything including engineering drawings, digital photos, point clouds, BIM models, and other construction documents. The benefits that were realized as a result of this apporach included reduced design time, fewer site visits, reduced land requirement and material waste, and most importantly for keeping the project on budgets and on schedule no change orders.

In China a geospatial+BIM approach was adopted for the Miaoshan 220kV Secondary Transformer Substation project. This was a large indoor substation in Dongxihu District, Wuhan City, Hubei Province. The project integrated digital tools for construction, site preparation, mechanical, electrical, and protection. The 3D digital modeling approach enabled collaborative design of an indoor substation with restricted space with multiple voltages in a very congested urban area with minimal impact on the existing buildings and infrastructure and all of this within a tight time frame. One of the important benefits of the approach was that minimized the impact of the substation on the existing infrastructure. Since the transformer substation is located in the downtown of Wuhan where buildings are dense, reality capture (laser scanning) was used to model the area surrounding the substation. This helped to ensure the substation site design did not conflict with surrounding buildings. To enable combining the model, the point cloud data, the digital terrain model and other external data everything was geolocated (Bentley calls this geo-coordinated). Geo-coordination, a term minted by Bentley, enables engineers and facilities managers to find things that are tagged,related, or close to a building element and it makes it possible to navigate the information environment, not only 3D design models (virtual reality), but also 3D models in a real world context (augmented reality). For this project it was fundamental not only for integrating the substation design in its real world context, but also for making it possible to reuse the BIM model and associated data during operation and maintenance.

In the U.S. AECOM, which is a US$18.2 billion a year firm in the construction sector and has been ranked for eight years running #1 in Engineering News Record‘s “Top 500 Design Firms”, uses BIM + GIS on design, build, finance and operate (DBFO) projects around the world. AECOM has applied this approach to the external campus of Denver International Airport, and to lease management at Orlando, Hong Kong, and South West Florida international airports. AECOM has found that the advantage of an integrated BIM+GIS approach based on a centralized integration of information is that it allows the client to make strategic decisions during the design, build and operate phases of the construction life-cycle.

The first project I have come across that has attempted estimate total savings attributable to an integrated BIM+geospatial full life-cycle approach to construction is the Napgur Metro project. This is a US$1.3 billion project underway in Nagpur, and appears to be the first project in Asia to integrate a digital twin with an asset management system to eliminate information loss about assets during design and construction. Since the Nagpur system implements a full-lifecycle approach to project management, the location of each of the 500,000 assets comprising the systems is recorded making it possible to click on an asset in SAP and be shown the location of the asset in a 3D map. Final deliverables are digital models rather than paper drawings providing a basis for digitalizing operations and maintenance. The benefits of a 3D BIM+geospatial approach have been projected based on a 25 year lifetime for the project. It is estimated that this will result in US$400,000 savings during plan, design and build. But the big benefit of an integrated BIM+geospatial approach is expected during the 25 year maintain and operate phase of the project. It is expected that operating manpower requirements will be reduced by 20%. The really big payoff is an estimated savings of US$222 million over the lifetime of the project.

Reflecting this trend toward integrated BIM+geospatial there has been a massive consolidation over the past decade of the major hardware and software vendors providing geospatial, BIM and reality capture equipment and software. Hexagon AB, founded in in 1975, began major acquistions in the 1990s which included Leica Geosystems and Intergraph. It has now reached $3.49 billion annual revenue. Trimble founded in 1978 also embarked on major acquisitions including Sketchup and Tekla and is now a $2.7 billion construction equipment and software company. More recently Topcon (Japan) acquired Sokkia and Clearedge and has achieved $1.2 billion in annual revenue. Perhaps most significantly as an indicator for this trend in the industry, Autodesk ($2.46 billlion) and ESRI ($1.1 billion), the 800 pound gorillas in BIM and GIS, respectively, have announced a partnership to improve interoperability between the AEC and geospatial worlds. Finally, Bentley ($700 million) + Siemens ($105 billion) are working closely on a number of construction projects.

As a growing number of owners see the advantages of a full life-cycle approach in construction projects and begin to change their procurement practices, construction companies are changing their business processes to optimize facility maintenance and operation.  The leading edge of this trend is AEC companies that have taken on the challenge of design, build, operate and/or maintain projects. They have reported that they have realized significant benefits from an integrated BIM+geospatial full lifecycle approach to construction. Now it appears that the word is getting out. Standards organizations in both the AEC and geospatial worlds are making progress on BIM+geospatial interoperability. Major software vendors Autodesk and ESRI have announced an agreement to partner for greater interoperability between their products. The open source community is also addressing the issue of BIM+geospatial interoperability. In the past the quantified advantages of an integrated BIM+geospatial approach have remained for the most part company internal, but we are now beginning to see data from real world projects that offer quantitative evidence for the benefits of an integrated BIM+geospatial full lifecycle approach for construction projects.