BIM-Based Design for Road Infrastructure: A Critical Focus on Modeling Guardrails and Retaining Walls

Although building information modeling (BIM) has been widely adopted in the building industry for several decades, the use of BIM in the context of transportation infrastructure has been slow in terms of both adoption and application. Industry and academia are increasingly making efforts to adopt BIM for other non-building civil infrastructure but, so far, there has not been a comprehensive review of these efforts specifically regarding transportation. This paper explores BIM implementation in an infrastructure design project. An Autodesk ® BIM-based tool, Civil 3D, is proposed as a potential BIM tool platform. This paper also focuses on modeling specific road elements not editable from the standard library, such as guardrails and retaining walls, as well as proposing different solutions using Revit and Subassembly Composer and analyzing the interoperability among BIM-based tools.