The early BIM adoption for a Contracting Authority: standard and methods in the ANAS approach

In recent years, Building Information Modelling (BIM) has played a key role in order to improve the planning process and the entire Life-Cycle of buildings and infrastructures. Despite the high level of expertise reached for buildings applications, further research is still needed in the infrastructure field. For this reason, the public company ANAS, which is the first Italian Contracting Authority for infrastructure projects, decided to arrange a partnership with Politecnico di Torino, in order to implement the BIM methodology into their actual practices. This is due to the BIM capability of forecasting construction criticalities and extremely high-cost operations and maintenance activities since the early stages of design. The research activity was focused on the implementation of BIM methods and tools for an infrastructure preliminary project, providing standards and rules to obtain a suitable model for ANAS purposes. The first step of the research was the identification of the main relevant datasets of the early stage of infrastructure design, which belong to several specific disciplines such as environment, geology, hydraulic, geotechnics, etc. Considering the large amount and the heterogeneity of data, it was necessary to define a structured database able to collect, share and exchange information, through the use of different parametric models. The Contracting Authority has the necessity to introduce a clear set of information contents in their contracts, in order to obtain visible and positive results, in terms of model delivery, since the procurement stage. For this reason an Employer’s Information Requirements (EIR) has been developed. This work revealed that main limitations to the spread of BIM into the early stage of the planning process are the immaturity of the Italian market, the software limitations and finally, the significant effort to evaluate real cost and time benefits of early BIM adoption.