# New Perspectives for BIM Usage in Transportation Infrastructure Projects
## 3 Results  
### Bridges  
In recent years, the big worldwide development of transportation has given rise to the construction of a very large number of bridges. Bridges play an important role in the transportation system giving support in the social and economic development and, therefore, are very important and indispensable infrastructure elements. The earliest research work encountered in the BIM bibliography on transportation infrastructure is the development of a microcomputational system for bridge management. Although bridges and buildings may appear similar and have similar characteristics, they are quite different in terms of construction, operation, and element classification [9]. According to official statistics Spain has a road network of 165,624 km and more than 100,000 bridges. From those, about 25,000 bridges are managed by the government and, given the age of many of them, only 6.5% do not present anomalies of any issue [10]. In addition to this, other bridges such as those of the train system or footbridges must be added as well as those managed by the regional governments and local authorities. The economic value of their new construction has an estimated cost of 12,000 million euros [11]. This gives an idea of the magnitude of the required maintenance and structural management activities. Here is where the BIM technology can develop an efficient management and maintenance system for bridges [12], which in turn will improve traffic safety. For that goal, a standard method for structural modeling is required. With it the bridge modeling will be easily completed with all the pertinent information. If the information relative to the foreseen actions to be taken in the bridge service life time, for example alerts to specific revisions and maintenance actions, the system will allow extending the life expectancy of the bridge and provide a planned schedule for future payments, so improving the project cost control. It is necessary to create a standard of collaborative bridge maintenance containing information of the past, present, and future status of the bridge. As [PERSON] [13] states, for each dollar invested in the project phase twenty dollars are invested in the construction phase and 70 or more along the infrastructure lifetime. Thus, BIM means big public funds savings in cost overruns that can reach 40% according to the survey reported by Stanford University [14] and in maintenance and management costs. In order to obtain a scheduled planning of a bridge service life, the bridge information model or BrIM must be built up during the design and construction stages [15]. However, most of the existing bridges were designed and constructed without contributing to the modeling. Therefore, the model must be reconstructed for most of the bridges. In this section some successful case studies of standard modeling software packages are presented that can be further used to elaborate plans for the bridge service life. The most important criteria in the design and construction phases refer to the level of development (LOD) and the level of information (LOI). In building construction LOD is directly related to internal specifications but in civil infrastructure the focus is on external specifications including geometry details and semantic information [16]. In fact, bridges have some unique characteristics such as road alignment or beam slopes that are of most importance in the design, construction, and fabrication of the bridge. An important number of publications [17; 18] suggest methods to achieve substantial improvements in the design process, a sharp reduction of conflicts and even industrial benefits through use of BrIM. However, currently LOD faces an important challenge in infrastructure elements like bridges [19]. Due to the high amount of work involved in the bridge modeling it is necessary to unify the basic information prior to the model setup [20]. In Figure 3 some examples of BrIM realized with different methodologies and with a high LOD level (LOD 300-400) are described.