Building Information Modeling is based on the idea of the continuous use of digital building models throughout the entire lifecycle of a built facility, starting from the early conceptual design and detailed design phases, to the construction phase, and the long phase of operation. BIM significantly improves information flow between stakeholders involved at all stages, resulting in an increase in efficiency by reducing the laborious and error-prone manual re-entering of information that dominates conventional paper-based workflows. Thanks to its many advantages, BIM is already practiced in many construction projects throughout the entire world. However, the fragmented nature of the construction industry still impedes its more widespread use. Government initiatives around the world play an important role in increasing BIM adoption: as the largest client of the construction industry in many countries, the state has the power to significantly change its work practices. This chapter discusses the motivation for applying BIM, offers a detailed definition of BIM along with an overview of typical use cases, describes the common BIM maturity grades and reports on BIM adoption levels in various countries around the globe.

The planning of large infrastructure facilities such as inner‐city subway tracks requires the consideration of widely differing scales, ranging from the kilometer scale for the general routing of the track down to the centimeter scale for detailed design of connection points. On the one hand this implies the utilization of both, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) as well as Building Information Modeling (BIM) tools, for performing the required analysis, modeling, and visualization tasks. On the other hand, a sound foundation of handling multi‐scale representations is required. Although multi‐scale modeling is already well established in the GIS field, there are no corresponding approaches in Infrastructure BIM so far. However, multi‐scale concepts are also much needed in the BIM context, as the planning process typically provides only rough information in the early stages and increasingly detailed and fine‐grained information in later stages. To meet this demand, this article presents a comprehensive concept for incorporating multi‐scale representations with building information models, with a particular focus on the geometric‐semantic modeling of shield tunnels. Based on a detailed analysis of the data modeling methods used in CityGML and the requirements present in the context of infrastructure planning projects, we discuss potential extensions to the BIM data model Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) for incorporating multi‐scale representations of shield tunnels. Particular emphasis is put on providing means for preserving the consistency of the representation across the different Levels‐of‐Detail (LoDs), while taking into account both semantics and geometry. For realizing consistency preservation mechanisms, we propose to apply a procedural geometry description which makes it possible to define explicit dependencies between geometric entities on different LoDs. The modification of an object on a coarse level consequently results in an automated update of all dependent objects on the finer levels. Finally, we discuss the transformation of the IFC‐based multi‐scale tunnel model into a CityGML compliant tunnel representation.

Innovative solutions for rapid and intelligent survey and assessment methods are required in maintenance, repair, retrofit and rebuild of enormous numbers of bridges in service throughout the world. Motivated by this need, a next-generation integrated bridge inspection system, called SeeBridge, has been proposed. An Information Delivery Manual (IDM) was compiled to specify the technical components, activities and information exchanges in the SeeBridge process, and a Model View Definition (MVD) was prepared to specify the data exchange schema to serve the IDM. The MVD was bound to the IFC4 Add2 data schema standard. The IDM and MVD support research and development of the system by rigorously defining the information and data that structure bridge engineers' knowledge. The SeeBridge process is mapped, parts of the data repositories are presented, and the future use of the IDM is discussed. The development underlines the real potential for automated inspection of infrastructure at large, because it demonstrates that the hurdles in the way of automated acquisition of detailed and semantically rich models of existing infrastructure are computational in nature, not instrumental, and are surmountable with existing technologies.

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