Arup Oversees BIM Design for Rastatt Tunnel

By Jim Rush January 12, 2016

Arup, acting as consultant to Deutsche Bahn for the digital design of the new Rastatt railway tunnel, supervised the BIM implementation for this infrastructure project. Construction work on the tunnel will start in spring 2016.

For Deutsche Bahn the planning and visualization of large construction projects with building information modeling (BIM) is a new way to increase the transparency and efficiency of their planning processes. Arup’s many years of experience in this area have been instrumental in this process.

“Arup has accompanied and supervised many international infrastructure projects with the help of BIM, which allowed us to substantially benefit from this experience and has significantly contributed to the success of the project,” said Sascha Björn Klar, project manager for large scale projects at Deutsche Bahn.

At 4.27 km (2.65 mile) long, the Rastatt tunnel is the second largest single structure in the Karlsruhe-Basel railway line. The Rastatt tunnel will cross the entire urban area of Rastatt underground. For this, the railway traffic will be routed down to 20 m below ground, which means significantly reducing noise pollution for residents. Tunnel excavation will start in the spring of 2016 with a total construction period of five years. From 2019 the building services of the tunnel will be installed.

On the basis of the traditionally established design of the tunnel, the use of BIM was tested within this pilot project. To do this, a 3D design was created and cost and time schedule were added as a fourth and fifth dimension. All project team members are now able to access a much larger data base, which significantly increases the transparency in terms of time and cost planning.