Integrated railway design using Infrastructure-Building Information Modeling. The case study of the port of Venice

The Infrastructure Building Information Modeling (I-BIM) is a digital information management system utilized in the transport infrastructures construction, becoming increasingly important. BIM modeling aims at bringing improvements to all design stages. The use of BIM modeling will also provide cost reduction and control, increase awareness to data, design information availability and usability in each phase of infrastructure life cycle. Although the advanced modeling of the building components and systems leads to advantages well highlighted by practice and literature, in case of transportation infrastructures a critical analysis could show if this design methodology carries out the same benefits. The limited availability of infrastructure components libraries and the difficulty in assigning parameters to the geometries of the objects (many of them with unique characteristics) have been frequently quoted as main obstacles to the BIM use for the transport infrastructures. With this background, the problem is to understand which BIM-for-building features must be preserved in the production and management practices of each infrastructure model (classes, information exchanges and relationship between the classes and the spatial decomposition). This work is focused on the study of the I-BIM methodologies for the transport infrastructures (in particular railway infrastructures), analyzing a case study related to the port of Venice. The upward trend of goods quantity daily passing through the port infrastructures, led to the need to expand the container loading/unloading ship areas and, at the same time, to find a new and faster goods exit from the port areas, compared to the existing railway infrastructures. The authors developed a pre-feasibility study to identify the railway connection between the new port station and the existing line Padova – Mestre and to evaluate the difficulties and the ripeness of available means for an integrated design with the BIM tools