China Communications Construction Company Ltd
CCCC Highway Consultants CO.,Ltd.
Panama Canal 4th bridge is 7 kilometers long, consisting of Cable-Stayed Main Bridge, Access Viaducts and Interchanges. The project is full of the highest technology content and objectives. Once completed, the new bridge will improve transport connectivity to inner Panama.
By employing openBIM standards, the project aims to increase interoperability ability and management efficiency among various disciplines/stakeholders in design stage as well as extend the BIM value to the whole project lifecycle from 3D to 4D, 5D, 7D as client mandates.
In a nutshell, the project intends to be a great infrastructure project utilizing openBIM standards.
The use of openBIM brings our project a smooth interoperability and data communication, helps the project move forwards.
- A general IDM lead the whole project information interaction and delivery strategy.
- IFC eliminate the barriers between different disciplines and software.
- LandXML gives us a great way to transforming alignment data to downstream discipline.
- BCF performs a good action for issue management.
- COBie gives us a great standard and template for data check and drop for further AM use.
BIM360, Navisworks, BIMTrack, BCFier.
Revit, Dynamo, Civil3D, AutoCAD, Inventor, ANSYS.
As client mandated in the TOR, the project strategic objectives are creating a seamless collaboration ecosystem inside the project team as well as maximizing BIM value by extending the usage from design to construction and asset management.
While the openBIM extends the benefits of BIM by improving the accessibility, usability, management and sustainability of digital data in the built asset industry. openBIM facilitates interoperability to benefit projects and assets throughout their lifecycle.
Thus the project strategic objectives are aligned with openBIM’s.
Panama Canal 4th bridge is located about 0.5 kilometers north of the Bridge of the Americas, Panama city, Panama.
Panama’s Ministry of Public Works confirmed the CCCC-CHEC consortium won the bid for the project of the fourth bridge over the Panama Canal on 2018, with a contract amount of 1.52 billion U.S. dollars.
The project is constructed with Design-Build mode owning by Ministry of Public Works(MOP). China Communications Construction Company(CCCC) and China Harbour Engineering Company(CHEC) are heading up the general contractor consortium for the design and construction of project. CCCC Highway Consultants CO.,Ltd(HPDI) is leading the overall design,by AASHTO standard, and BIM work. The project is currently under design phase.
Panama Canal 4th bridge is located about 0.5 kilometers north of the Bridge of the Americas, with a design life of 100 years. The bridge total length is 7 kilometers, consisting of a double-pylon steel cable-stayed Main Bridge, Access Viaducts, and Interchange Areas. Two interchanges will be built at each end of the canal. The overall construction is expected to take 60 months.
The Panama Canal is a focus of world attention. Because of their special geographic location and technical difficulty, the cross-canal bridges are American pearl projects. The fourth bridge over the Panama Canal is full of the highest technology content.
The project is a mega infrastructure project. There are around one Cable-Stayed Bridge, four Precast Girder Bridges, thirteen Cast-In-Place Girder Bridges, five Culverts and forty-seven Roads in the project,.
The client mandated in the TOR, the project strategic objectives are maximizing BIM value by extending the usage from design to construction and asset management as called 3D, 4D, 5D, and 7D. The client also required the contractors to use openBIM solutions such as IFC, BCF and COBie in order to create a seamless collaboration ecosystem inside the project team. Thus, we adopted openBIM solutions to the project from the beginning of design phase.
The project is also full of complexity such as multiple stakeholders, large scale cross-disciplines design team, huge infrastructure design and construction difficulties as well as schedule and safety challenges.
The design team consists of various disciplines, including Road, Bridge, Surveying, Transportation, Landscape, Lighting, Drainage, Mechanical. Managing such a large team, in terms of file management, data transformation, time management, quality assurance, is an extraordinarily complex topic.
Due to the special geographical location, necessary Special Studies have to be taken, such as Earthquake Analysis, Wind Analysis, Ship Collision Analysis and Environmental Impact Assessment.
The success of constructing the project have to deal with multiple third-party stakeholders such as Panama Ports Company (PPC), ACP Administration, local airport Authority, etc.
With the focus of world attention, the project is under tight schedule and high-quality demanding.
It is expected to alleviate traffic congestion which directly benefit the circulation of more than 130 thousand daily vehicles. It will be a continuation of the Corredor Norte highway to Panamá Oeste province, connecting with the Pan-American highway, which also crosses the canal, allowing users to travel from the Tocumen area to the region west of the canal without having to go through the city.
Once completed, the new bridge will connect the two ends of the Interoceanic Canal, boost transport links to Panama West and improve connectivity to inner Panama and benefit at least 2 million local people
The project client required full BIM usage in design stage, construction stage and maintenance stage in the TOR. Client also mandated IFC as delivery format. BCF and COBie are also mandated in the project in order to assure the data quality.
The openBIM standards, combined with ISO19650, are adopted in the project along the whole design phase, solving design challenges, improving cross-discipline collaborations and project interoperability abilities, reducing coordination issues, and advancing project data qualities. The detail usage of openBIM is described below:
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IDM: In this infrastructure project, we create a tailored general cross-disciplinary IDM for the design phase, including the data exchange from Survey Engineer to Alignment Engineer, Infrastructure Engineer and Service Engineer. The IFC and LandXML format-based files are applied in the data exchange scenario.
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IFC: IFC2x3 files, hold structure information such as road structure model and bridge structure model, are transformed to Service Engineer for designing the transportation facilities and bridge accessories as well as constitute the federated model for clash detection and coordination. We also do innovation to IFC standards by parsing IFC files into graph-based database for further data manipulations.
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BCF: BCF as the issue communication format are used broadly in the project. In both the modelling software(Revit) and coordination software(Navisworks), we create BCF-based issues and publish them onto the BIMTrack platform which is acted as the central server for hosting, tracking and interacting all the issues.
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COBie: With the aim of extending the BIM use to Asset Management phase as well as making routine data validation, we applied COBie standard to the project from design phase. The strategy of handling COBie is firstly we developed a COBie Information Delivery Plan for the project considering the asset management requirement. Secondly, we innovated the COBie spatial arrangement standard to fit in the linear infrastructures. Finally, we employed a FM platform called YouBIM where BIM models together with COBie sheet can upload. As a user-end, Facility Managers can view and check the data in the YouBIM software by every delivery.
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LandXML: LandXML is used in two cases in the project. In the first case, Alignment Engineer exports the design-ready alignment data to LandXML file, and pass to Road Engineer and Bridge Engineer for their specific design as all the linear structures are relied on the alignment. In the second case, Survey Engineer exports the Topography surfaces to LandXML to Bridge Engineer for designing the foundation excavation.
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IFC and LandXML provide a readable protocol for the data exchange, reducing a large amount of time dealing with different format and files.
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By using BCF, all the issues can be maintained and tracked for the whole issue lifecycle till closed. The project quality is improved and extra cost is reduced.
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By adopting COBie in the early stage of the project, data quality is ensured and potentially avoid the further mistakes during construction and maintenance phase in advance. This usage have a great ROI(Return on Investment).
As a summary, by applying openBIM philosophy, the project was operated more efficiently and smoothly where the data silos are reduced and interoperability is enhanced. The project is optimized in the design phase and walk towards a sustainable lifecycle.
IFC: We did innovation to IFC standards by parsing IFC files into graph-based database for further data manipulations. The IFC entities are created as objects in the database, mutually connecting with relationships such as IfcRelAggregates, IfcRelConnects etc. This IFC-schema database will allow Data Engineer to retrieve and operate according to project need.
COBie: We innovated the COBie spatial arrangement standard to fit in the linear infrastructure project. The project is arranged to Project(Panama 4th Bridge), Project Division(By independent structures), Zones(bridge, road, buildings, etc) and Spaces(By chainage). Finally, we employed a FM platform for Facility Managers to view and check the data.
More MVD defined for the information exchange scenarios in infrastructure project, for example bridge design to analysis, bridge façade to wind simulation, road design to cost estimation, etc.
