FEA in Road Engineering Applications?

The current urbanization, industrialization and planning of new city-districts require efficient design to manage the energy, ecology and economical demands set for living environment. The efficiency of Building Information Model (BIM) design in construction sites has been proven through many projects. The full overview and control of design, construction and life-cycle of a structure brings sustainability to buildings and provides optimized purpose for their use. Residential and non-residential buildings, bridges and other civil and structural engineering products will adopt BIM next to benefit from advanced control of infrastructure and related services. Road design is a complex process requiring collaboration in planning, designing, constructing and execution of designs. The design must consider soil investigations, infrastructure planning, various ecologic aspects and the construction designs to achieve the set durability and efficiency goals. This includes the economic implications and planned maintenance during the entire life-cycle of the construction. The impacts of these features could be improved by detailed analysis and monitoring of the physical behavior of the structure during construction and operative use. The physical performance of the structure may be efficiently analyzed by using numerical modelling, such as Finite Element Analysis (FEA). Integration of FEA in the BIM of road design may significantly improve the road construction and its features during the entire life-cycle. The presented paper discusses the possibilities to improve the road designs via applying FEA tools in information model data exchange. The actual on-site monitoring and analysis would improve the quality of the road building and support its efficient and timely maintenance. Active and detailed collaboration of architects, engineers, constructors and facility managers could yield to efficient and sustainable designs and significantly improve the quality of current and future plans.