Proposition of Sustainable and Long-Term Geotechnical Data Management to Support Building Information Modeling

Abstract

Extending Building Information Modeling (BIM) to deal with geotechnical data, and more generally environmental data, is not a new idea, yet application of it remain a topic of innovation. In the French collaborative project MINnD that aim at extending BIM capacities for infrastructures, a dedicated working group was designed in order to properly describe the environment and existing interactions with an Underground Infrastructure and its equipment. This paper presents the results and propositions from this working group, especially in terms of geoscience data standardization and management. In other words, it deals with standardization of “classical” information such as geological and geotechnical investigations, geophysical measurements, laboratory analysis, pollutant presence, existing buildings, etc. It also concerns/involves “specific” information such as geological, geotechnical and hydrogeological models, risk management data, structure-sizing expression and associated tender documents. In that context, this paper does not propose an extension of the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) but defend the possibility of reusing and extending existing standards for geoscience data, such as GeoSciML and GroundWaterML2 from the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). It also introduces pieces of information system architecture that could be used to build sustainable and long-term geotechnical data capitalization.