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Surveys & Automated Design
Digital Collaboration Using IFC and BIM Technology
Project Number: SPR-1756
Contract Number: 2024-0580
Status: Complete
Start Date: 06/03/2024
End Date: 08/31/2025
Summary:
The Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT) manages a wide range of transportation assets throughout their lifecycle—spanning design, construction, operation, and maintenance. Effective asset management requires extensive data coordination across internal teams and external stakeholders. This creates challenges due to varied data storage practices, the use of various file formats, and manual data exchanges. These can lead to inefficiencies in asset-related information management. This report investigates these challenges, maps the digital data workflow and exchange requirements for multiple assets, and evaluates potential digital solutions—specifically Building Information Modeling (BIM), Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), and Common Data Environments (CDE)—as potential tools to improve workflows and improve data accuracy and consistency across all project phases. This project uses literature review to evaluate the state of the art, surveys to determine the current state of adoption of such technologies across state DOTs, interviews with MDOT personnel and contractors, and process mapping to identify key challenges. Such challenges include disconnected databases, manual data entry, and inconsistent updating of asset databases across the lifecycle of the studied assets. It also highlights the limitations of relying on 2D plan sets, where asset information is provided as text annotations, making retrieval and reuse difficult. From contractor interviews, feedback from contractors suggests the need for accurate, consistent data, whether in 2D plan sets or 3D models, and anticipates challenges related to technology adoption and workforce training, particularly for contractors, if such technologies are fully adopted. The report recommends potential pathways for adopting BIM, IFC, CDEs, including advantages and disadvantages of each. Finally, a detailed case study is presented on pavement asset management using IFC, supporting the feasibility and benefits of these digital approaches, but also demonstrating their limitations. Overall, the findings suggest that a transition toward integrated digital asset management systems would enhance efficiency, reduce manual errors, and support more effective long-term infrastructure management.
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