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Zigurat Global Institute of Technology
Blog / BIM & Construction Management
BIM and CDE in the Design and Construction of London Crossrail
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London Crossrail will go down in history as Europe’s biggest infrastructure project of the hour. In February we introduced London Crossrail in our blog and resumed some of the benefits that using BIM methodology contributed to the execution of the project.
An important characteristic of London Crossrail is the fact that they are building the physical and the digital railway at the same time. A project of this magnitude can only be carried out without error thanks to CDE (a Common Data Environment) that was owned and managed by the client, and BIM methodology that allowed maximization of data and technology.
When a project is carried out following the key principles of BIM —that of information sharing, accessible data environment, data integrity, collaboration, technology, asset life-cycle management, new processes and new project culture— the interface risks are easily avoided and the process will be more cost and time efficient.
Common Data Environment
Operating within the BIM environment requires all parties to collaborate and share the information they create in a mutually accessible online space known as a common data environment or CDE. That collection of data is known as an 'information model'. The project delivery in the digital (BIM) world is considerably different from the old one where everyone had a hard copy of everything. Information models can be used to inform all stages of a built asset's lifecycle; from inception right through to operation and renewal.
When a project is carried out following the key principles of BIM —that of information sharing, accessible data environment, data integrity, collaboration, technology, asset life-cycle management, new processes and new project culture— the interface risks are easily avoided and the process will be more cost and time efficient.
Benefits of a CDE
The most considerable benefits of using BIM and working in a CDE are:- Better decision making
- Single source of truth
- Avoids duplication
- Encourages collaboration
- Reduced waste
- Reduces time and cost in producing coordinated data
- Consistent reliable data through design, construction and into operations.
Smart Railway
When building a Smart railway, it is important to have an asset information management plan, that defines the overall approach to asset information and specifies the governance approach. It should also be possible to find there the key supporting documents and links to other documents/standards (classification; AD4’s; etc). When all this data is organized and the systems tested, it can be handed over to Ops & Maintenance. The data generated by a smart station is the following:
General BIM Lessons Learned
Given the magnitude of the London Crossrail project, there are many valuable and unprecedented lessons that BIM professionals can draw from this experience. Such as:- treat data as a valuable resource (in case of Crossrail, owned by the client)
- establish your requirements (at business and project level)
- structure data with the end-use in mind
- good asset breakdown structure & classification
- use relational databases
- become data-centric (the CDE)
- Data interoperability (be prescriptive)
- Being led by ID and software
- People, in general, don't like change
London Crossrail in Numbers
In order to better grasp the magnitude of the project, we can look at the numbers:| Cost | £15.9 billion |
| e-Documents stored (so far) | 3,560,834 |
| Assets being defined (so far) | 468,490 |
| Drawings (so far) | 392,758 |
| CDE users (so far) | 20,573 |
| GIS mapping layers | ~700 |
| Main Construction contracts | 60 |
| Main Design contracts | 23 |
| Large future maintainers | 2 |
| Crossrail | 1 |
The Legacy of London Crossrail
Crossrail has left a learning legacy like no other. The Crossrail Learning Legacy aims to share knowledge and insight, through means such as case studies and technical papers providing lessons and recommendations to help others. In their webpage, you can consult the 12 themes and topic areas that cover all the experiences related to the project.
