London Underground’s Northern line extension, which is being built from Kennington to Battersea with a new intermediate station at Nine Elms, uses Building Information Modelling (BIM) as the basis of its design and documentation. This requires LU to put the same level of rigour and governance into creating and managing information about infrastructure assets, as it does in building and operating the assets themselves.
BIM is a process involving the collaborative production, use and management of digital representations of the physical and functional characteristics of a facility or asset. The resulting information models, when fully coordinated, provide a shared knowledge resource to support decision-making about a facility or asset throughout its life – from early concept stages, through increasing detailed design, construction, operation and maintenance, and ultimately decommissioning, removal and demolition.
The objective of BIM is to procure/produce, manage and maintain data and information about engineered assets that are complete, consistent and trustworthy for use across operational and business intelligence purposes. This aims to drive efficiencies in the production, modification, operation and decommissioning of engineered assets, through data analysis that helps improve decision making to deliver best value to stakeholders.