Knowing our manmade infrastructure as well as our natural infrastructure

Global challenges are huge

• Existing infrastructure is failing
• Unrelenting demands of rapidly growing cities
• Pressure to better manage natural resources

Current methods aren’t good enough

• Gap in financing needed to meet demand
• Construction productivity is not keeping pace
• Century old delivery tools and processes are inadequate

Much has been studied, researched and analyzed allowing us to understand our natural infrastructure ecosystems better than our man made ones.  We can predict hurricanes, storms, tornados well in advance over the last decade, but not how our infrastructure will react to these occurrences, how it ages, how much it truly costs during its life, or how do we prepare for its end of life.  The question is - why is that the case?

To protect all cities but certainly coastal and water-bounded cities we need to couple both hard and soft infrastructure approaches while at the same time reviewing and revising current and future development approaches and patterns to deliver on that vision as populations ebb and flow like the tides.  Infrastructure is a system of systems, interconnected, interrelated and interdependent. Our future infrastructures capacity and resiliency to environment and its people relies on the decisions we make today. Understanding our manmade ecosystem to the level we understand natural ecosystems will be required. We have modern tools and processes, but modern thinking is required to put it in place and make it the norm not the exception.

The gap between infrastructure investment demand and supply of funding is growing rapidly thus, intensifying the competition for capital which will flow to those projects backed by the best business case. The coupling of infrastructure investments with a strategic and innovative use of 3D technology will not only provide infrastructure owners and investors with a better understanding of the scope and complexity of the investment, but can also help them to route efficiency gains made from this change toward financing future projects.

State governments caught in the squeeze between federal funding cuts and local government demands are starting to pit cities, counties and regions against each other in competitive funding programs. Funding priority will be assigned to projects that offer the greatest "bang" including financial, social, environmental, resilience and regional enhancements for those bucks.

BIM can help transform the infrastructure and asset lifecycle process – increasing productivity, improving efficiency, and lowering costs – through:

• information-rich models to gain greater insight
• a “single source of truth” to improve coordination
• agile and powerful tools to expand innovation

Project sponsors and their designers need incentives to think and act beyond traditional steel and concrete takeoffs to design to optimal outcomes across multiple categories of cost, benefit and risk associated with financial, sustainable, and resilience value for money.  By taking this approach we can start to understand our manmade infrastructure a bit better and bring it in line with our understanding of the natural infrastructure systems like weather, waterways or even rainforests.

                                                                            - Terry Bennett