Session

Track: Application & Implementation

Connecting the Dots
Brandon Meinert

Projects are becoming more and more complex these days, generating massive amounts of data at an alarming rate, often going underutilized due to disconnected systems. This, in turn, creates challenges for project teams and stakeholders to maintain a single source of truth and make well-informed timely decisions.

Today's project teams require a common data environment (CDE) that allows for effective system integration and provides ability to visualize projects holistically and run “what if” scenarios to assess design changes, cost/schedule impacts, weather disruptions security events, and more.

This type of environment is critical to simulate, predict, and inform decisions based on real-world conditions. Furthermore, facility owners require an interconnected system that effectively can report out on occupiable space, maintainable assets, egress routes, energy consumption, and building automation system components.

A digital twin of a facility that includes these data points in a single common operating platform can save hundreds of hours of maintenance while creating a digital repository for as-built documentation.

During this session, you will learn about several efforts the U.S. Army Research & Development Center (ERDC) currently is working on with regard to building digital twins for rich visualization to support active project delivery and facility management use cases, with follow on efforts focused on supporting higher-level Army initiatives of installation strategy and infrastructure modernization.

Implementation of BIM/Digital Twins at MTA (NY)
Iwan Kinal, Gjenovefe Vukvpalaj

This presentation will provide a case study on how the Metropolitan Transportation Authority – NY approaches and implements BIM and Digital Twins, including valuable insights, lessons learned, and best practices. It also will examine the software stack that MTA has standardized for BIM and Digital Twins and describe data management practices employed for these technologies.

MTA owns and/or operates significant transportation assets in the NYC Metropolitan Area, including a subway and bus network in the city, commuter railroads to the suburbs, and several vehicular bridges and tunnels. MTA has been implementing BIM on select capital projects for the last 15 years.

Over the past few years, MTA has started combining other digital data, such as point clouds, reality models, and photogrammetry with the BIM models, thus creating Digital Twins. Since 2022, BIM has been required on a greater portion of capital projects, accelerating the rate of implementation.

MTA has around 15 active capital projects in various stages producing BIM models. MTA uses a CDE across all capital projects to centrally store CADD/BIM/Digital Twin data, and MTA’s Contractors and Consultants work live on the BIM models within this environment. This allows MTA project managers and project controls staff real-time access to the models being prepared for the capital projects. BIM has had the most success in the Design phase of capital projects, helping to improve the quality of designs.

Ideally, the Digital Twin should be utilized throughout the full lifecycle of an asset. Although MTA has seen a lot of success with BIM on capital projects, this has not fully translated to use of the BIM Models/Digital Twins in operations and asset management.

Overall, MTA’s experience with BIM/Digital Twins, including both positive and negative aspects, can help provide valuable insights for other infrastructure owners.

Digital Twinning of the GSA San Ysidro Landport of Entry
Edmund Newman

Following a large, three-phase campus expansion and renovation of the San Ysidro Land Port of Entry, the General Services Administration moved to implement a BIM-based digital twin as using the recently released ArcGIS for Indoors platform.

The intent was to investigate and implement possible streamlining facility management activities, providing a graphical interface to a building and its CMMS data, and to document existing conditions for future design and construction workflows.

This pilot includes integrating as-built BIM models, COBie asset data, and O&M documents with the GSA's existing Maximo Computerized Maintenance Management System using the ArcGIS Indoors GIS solution.

We will discuss our implementation adventures encountered along this journey.

Key takeaways include best practices for optimizing design and construction workflows for the development of digital twins, as well as an overview of the common pitfalls to avoid along the digital transformation journey.

Also covered will be discussion of issues related to data storage in the government, the problems involved in capturing and displaying complex BIM data in a simplified GIS environment, multiuser platform interactions, and data-interaction bottlenecks.