Building Information Modelling (BIM) has already established itself as a best-practice approach for efficient productivity in the field of building design and operation, yet is still in its early days in the field of infrastructure. Recent efforts to promote the integration of BIM into large-scale infrastructure projects also target the construction and operation of railway networks. The existing methodologies traditionally used for railways are however neither horizontally, between sub-contractors, nor vertically, along the life-cycle, fully integrated, leading to possible loss of information. There exist data exchange schemata to reduce the problem of storage and information flow, but they are not yet optimized towards railways, nor is there a common standard that construction industries have agreed upon. Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) recently added the concept of a linear reference system for infrastructure assets, yet is still only focused on the geometry needed during the construction phase. Railway Markup Language (railML) is an accepted data exchange schema tailored towards providing topology for railway operations, yet lacks full support of geometry data. A prototype tool linking these two schemata is developed in this thesis to ensure consistent data in both geometrical and topological representations. The geometrical entity and element sets of IFC and railML show sufficient overlap to support a consistent data exchange with the exception of transition curves. However, the exchange of topological data is, for example, limited regarding the network stored in railML, as IFC does not yet have entities that describe the relationships among alignments. The developed prototype allows to reconstruct a simple track geometry from scratch for a given railML file with minimal user input but loses the relationship information as well as object aggregation after the transfer to IFC. Conversely, the IFC geometry can be converted reasonably well to railML but the user would need to manually input navigability between alignments. Overall, this thesis demonstrates that reasonable consistency, beyond minor differences in geometry, can be maintained between IFC and railML, if IFC adds an entity set that can store the relationships among alignments. IFC already offers an analogue to topological representations in the form of distribution flow networks such as pipe networks, which could alternatively be abstracted to fit railway networks. Although IFC is extending in scope, a tool like the one developed in this thesis might still be required.     «

Building Information Modelling (BIM) has already established itself as a best-practice approach for efficient productivity in the field of building design and operation, yet is still in its early days in the field of infrastructure. Recent efforts to promote the integration of BIM into large-scale infrastructure projects also target the construction and operation of railway networks. The existing methodologies traditionally used for railways are however neither horizontally, between sub-contract...     »