BIM-GIS integration for advanced city management and flow monitoring

Problem statement

Integrating different systems used in city management represents a continuing challenge. Building Information Modelling (BIM) provides detailed representations of buildings and infrastructure (bridges, tunnels and so on). Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are outdoor focused and provide less detailed maps of larger areas (cities, terrain, underground, vegetation and so on). While both support very advanced simulations and analysis, they are used separately due to several gaps that hinder their integration. An integrated BIM-GIS tool combining advanced geographic information with detailed indoor data of complex buildings would support many applications. By linking information such as traffic data, available paths and accesses, the flow of people circulating on the site of interest along with others, better monitoring tools can be provided, allowing advanced prediction of risks and management in an emergency crisis.

Solutions

To solve the integration issues, we consider a flexible approach that tackles the technical challenges while considering constraints that matter for the stakeholders:

• Uniform 3D Data modelling: providing a common representation to BIM and GIS data to interact while preserving their spatial properties.
• Data storage and access: storing the relevant information (geometry, topology, semantic) conveniently for access and queries while providing to the different stakeholders the ability to control their data that are exchanged.
• Data sustainability and update: designing sustainable data management systems to facilitate convenient updating and avoid data duplication/decay issues.
• Use of standards and open-source tools: ensuring interoperability by relying on international standards for the data. The use of open-source tools where suitable will allow all parties to freely use components of interest for further developments.

Our goal is to provide solutions to the stakeholders that facilitates their data management, analysis (such as simulations, prediction and so on), maintenance, update and interaction with other stakeholders. Conscious of the concerns of our partners, our vision is outlined by three major criteria that we carry with us all along our investigations and developments:

1. Respect of the privacy of the data and clear specification of the IP issues.
2. Priority to the re-use of existing data and tools rather than systematic setup of new ones
3. Priority to open-source tools, in accordance with the two previous points.

Outcomes

Our team of experts will be committed to deliver an effective proof of concepts along with a high-quality consultancy in several domains relevant to the stakeholders. Expected deliverables can be listed as follow:

• Detailed reports addressing identified issues and use cases for the stakeholders.
• Proof of concepts including prototypes of software.
• National and international publications to provide visibility to the parties involved.