Development of Concrete Bridge Data Schema for Interoperability

Abstract

The advancement of key aspects of bridge information modeling for software interoperability and data exchange has attracted increasing interest from various stakeholders in the bridge industry. Potential benefits include reductions in project delivery time, errors, and cost. However, a lack of standardized data exchange protocols hinders the development and deployment of such modeling. This situation causes the still-all-too-fragmented bridge industry to waste a large amount of money each year. The research presented in this paper was motivated by the advantages of using interoperability to streamline the approaches used to deliver concrete bridge projects. Every bridge project requires frequent communication; without improved software interoperability, projects can become bogged down with requests for information. This paper develops, demonstrates, and implements key aspects of interoperable data schema protocols that can be used to facilitate the exchange of bridge information in the planning, design, detailing, fabrication, and construction phases of concrete bridge projects. These protocols will be public domain and software neutral with their implementation being considered in various bridge software applications.

Overview of BIM application for bridge - highway and infrastructure projects in Viet Nam

“…Integrated project models facilitate whole-project visualization, clash detection, and construction planning. BIM has helped in the real-time evaluation of design criteria and rule checking and has supported the quality of design [16,28,[30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41]. BIM can help in different phases of design that include preliminary design, detailed design, and design optimization [42].…”

A NoSQL data management infrastructure for bridge monitoring

“…By adhering to the data exchange standard, information models can be translated into different file formats for different applications in a seamless manner, which can reduce work loads and human errors on manual file conversion (Eastman et al 2011, Bernstein et al 2012. There have been several research efforts to develop information modeling standards for bridge engineering applications (Chen and Shirolé 2006, Shirolé et al 2008, Karaman et al 2013, Ali et al 2014. To facilitate interoperability, semantically meaningful languages, such as extensible markup languages (such as XML), are employed to represent the bridge model.…”

“…Research efforts have also been initiated towards developing bridge information modeling (BrIM) standards for bridge structures (Chen and Shirolé 2006, Shirolé et al 2008, Samec et al 2014. Current BrIM efforts focus primarily on the geometric information and material properties (Karaman et al 2013, Ali et al 2014. Standard markup language, such as XML, is employed as the modeling language to facilitate data interoperability.…”

A data management infrastructure for bridge monitoring

“…BrIM includes parametric information (such as 3-dimensional geometry), structural information (such as material), and management data (such as inspection output) and is intended to support data exchange among applications and project participants [15,16]. BrIM schemas use extensible markup language (XML) as the basic syntax to attain interoperability [17,18]. While XML based model representation has been shown appropriate, the XML based schemas often involve complex data structures such as nested data hierarchy.…”