Supporting Tunnel Safety Assessment with an Information Model

Building information models (BIMs) promise to support information provisioning over the entire lifecycle of infrastructure assets. Currently, however, few integrated BIM decision support systems exist. Therefore, many modeling efforts are being undertaken across the world to gradually support more and more key processes through the application of BIMs. The safety assessment of infrastructure is a key process that can potentially be effectively supported by applying integrated BIM tools. For the Netherlands highways agency, the safety assessment of road tunnels provides an important challenge. Many technical complexities and domain-specific laws and regulations impact safety assessment. Safety assessment is determinative for success; for example, every road tunnel must be checked for compliance with laws and regulations before it can open. This paper proposes an information model that can support the safety assessment task in the context of the Netherlands highway agency. It departs from requirement analysis efforts conducted within the organization and provides use cases and a description of the information model developed. The paper concludes with a description on how we plan to integrate and test the model on the ability to support tunnel projects.