Collaboration through integrated BIM and GIS for the design process in rail projects: formalising the requirements

Many of the obstacles to effective delivery of rail projects (in terms of cost, time and quality) can be traced back to poor collaboration across complex design teams and supply chains. As in any infrastructure delivery process, it is important to make decisions collaboratively at an early design stage. Advanced systems such as Building Information Modelling (BIM) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) can facilitate collaboration during the decision-making process and boost work efficiencies. Such potential benefits are not realised because the roles of BIM and GIS in facilitating collaboration are not clearly understood or articulated. This paper aims to identify and articulate collaboration requirements during the design stage of rail projects. To achieve this, a mixed-method approach was employed to examine the issues that hinder collaboration in rail projects. An online questionnaire was designed to assess the state-of-art in BIM and GIS, followed by fifteen follow-up face to face interviews with experts to identify collaboration issues and suggestions to overcome them. The research identified the main challenges to effective collaboration and provided suggestions to overcome them. The main challenges were managing information and a reluctance to use new collaboration technologies. The main solution which emerged from the data was to develop an original Collaborative Plan of Work (CPW). The developed CPW is tailored to rail projects and has been formulated by combining the RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) Plan of Work and the GRIP Stages (Governance for Railway Investment Projects). This comprehensive plan of work, which is uniquely collaboration-focused, is significant because it can be further developed to formulate a precise process model for collaboration during the design process of rail projects. Such a process can (for example) be configured into the workflow prescribed by a Common Data Environment.