Towards an Integrated Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Geographic Information System (GIS) Platform for Infrastructure

Due to the increasing global population, the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry is placed in front of a significant challenge to provide and maintain the necessary urban development and solid infrastructure systems to support this increase. Infrastructure systems must be resilient and sustainable, especially being critical to the nation’s economy and progress. Creating such systems can be achieved by implementing emerging technologies and adopting efficient and cost-effective approaches to rehabilitate and expand the existing infrastructure systems and creating new ones. A major technology implemented in the horizontal construction sector is Building Information Modeling (BIM), which also has proven beneficial for the vertical construction sector. However, implementing BIM in horizontal construction is still emerging. To maximize its potential, BIM will require its integration with another technology pillar: Geographic Information System (GIS). Generally, BIM’s central focus is to provide comprehensive semantic information of the construction projects, while GIS provides spatial data and details about the surrounding environment. Thus, their integration can leverage their adoption, and it becomes vital to study how BIM and GIS interact. This paper addresses the BIM-GIS integration by synthesizing the existing research corpus and provide insights into the current usage of an integrated BIM-GIS system for infrastructure. The paper’s findings show that the applications mainly cover modeling and design of infrastructure assets, infrastructure construction and scheduling, monitoring and compliance check, and infrastructure facility and asset management. Furthermore, this paper investigates the requirements to optimize the adoption of integrated BIM-GIS for infrastructures.