Civil Information Modeling and Social Assessment for Sustainable Infrastructure Management

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Building Information Modeling (BIM) is transforming building construction from an industry that is fundamentally based on drawings to one that is based on shared computer models. This research will help to extend this transformational technology from buildings to the field of civil infrastructure--Civil Information Modeling (CIM). First, the research will develop data representation models to incorporate asset management information into CIM and will contribute these to international data standards. Second, these data will be used to support advanced decision support analysis and tools that will help infrastructure managers to identify the “best” course of action (i.e. optimal, most cost-effective, most sustainable) from a wide range of possible infrastructure development, operations, and maintenance actions, given the constraints of limited resources. Third, techniques will be developed to assess the technical, economic and sustainability performance of infrastructure systems, with a particular emphasis on tools that collect data from end users and other public groups (by making use of social networking techniques). Together, these advances will help provide a new generation of information technologies that can help to address the significant challenges facing our public infrastructure.