Monitoring Railway Infrastructure Sites Through BIM and GIS

Due to their nature, rail infrastructure projects greatly benefit from the adoption of workflows based on intelligent models and point clouds to allow off-site analyses without the need of the physical presence on the field. FSTechnology, a division of the Italian Railways, set up this workflow based on an integration of Autodesk software—including Autodesk Construction Cloud, Revit software, and Civil 3D software—with Esri ArcGIS GeoBIM. We combined CAD, building information modeling (BIM), point clouds, and orthophotos with geographic information system (GIS) and game engine technologies and added the construction program in a browser-based 4D solution with issue tracking. This is not only intended to monitor the progress of the physical works being executed, but also to achieve better control during the maintenance phase of the railways. All these combined and advanced technologies help us to monitor the most-critical infrastructures like viaducts and bridges, and factors of environmental interest and relevance, supported by artificial intelligence.