The International Association for Automation and Robotics in Construction
Publications / CCC 2025 - Zadar, Croatia
APPROACH FOR SEMANTIC ENRICHMENT AND VALIDATION OF DIGITAL BRIDGE MODELS IN SUSTAINABILITY ASSESSMENT
This paper addresses the challenge of efficiently integrating and validating sustainability data within digital bridge models for accurate sustainability assessments. As bridge infrastructure faces growing demands for maintenance and modernization, alongside the increasing importance of climate protection measures and increased traffic load, it is essential to assess the sustainability of structures in a transparent, comprehensive and solid way. For a holistic sustainability assessment, a great deal of information from various sources is needed, which currently shows gaps and quality deficiencies. Building Information Modeling (BIM) presents significant potential for evaluating the sustainability of bridges across their entire lifecycle. For this reason, this paper develops a methodological approach focused on the semantic enrichment of BIM models, enabling the automatic integration of relevant sustainability data and ensuring the accuracy and completeness of these models. It takes into account the specific requirements for modeling bridges within the sustainability context and addresses practical challenges in the technical implementation of this approach. Therefore, existing workflows and research approaches are analyzed by a literature review beforehand. The analysis also investigates the integration of external data and systems that can provide supplementary sustainability-specific information, with the design of the link being of equal importance. The proposed method is then applied to a practical case study to validate its efficiency and applicability. Finally, some recommendations for future development work in this field are provided. The results demonstrate that partial automation of sustainability data integration into digital bridge models ensures data quality while reducing the effort involved in data collection and validation. As a conclusion, for enhanced sustainability evaluations and optimization of bridge lifecycles during the design phase, more effort should be made in data management in the infrastructure sector to fill the data gaps. This requires obligatory regulations, more digital data and technical recommendations.