BIM and Tunnelling – a Norwegian application: the Sotra Link Project

The adoption of the BIM approach (Building Information Modeling) is an established practice for infrastructure design in Nordic countries and is gradually becoming a mandatory requirement for big projects in other developed countries such as Italy. The current paper deals with the application of BIM to the Sotra Link Project (SLP), a complex project of several underground and surface structures between Sotra island and the city of Bergen (Norway), including a 900 m-long suspension bridge and 12.5 km of tunnels. Adopted from the Early Design to the Detail Design of Sotra Link Project, BIM approach allowed a fruitful information exchange between design teams and client, the creation of a comprehensive design database, and so ensuring design consistency across disciplines, cost optimization and time saving. Within the frame of tunneling, the implementation of innovative discipline-specific workflows including project databases, BIM modeling and computational design software enabled the creation of a comprehensive geotechnical/structural model of all the tunnels involved in the SLP, which constituted a unified data source for deliverables, bill of quantities, and validation of the final design.