BIM Evolution for Wet Infrastructure: What If We Started the Panama Canal Expansion Today?

This class will provide an overview of BIM implementation on one of the world's largest projects, the Panama Canal Third Set of Locks project which includes two massive lock facilities - one on the Atlantic side and another on the Pacific - each with three chambers and complex mechanical and electrical systems for locking Neo-Panamax vessels.BIM technology was used to manage the design and construction of this complex project.What if we started the Panama Canal Expansion today, with the dramatic advances in BIM that have occurred in only the last few years? With InfraWorks - which was not available during the planning phase - we can propose site design and road layout with GIS information. With Revit Parts - which was not available during the design phase - we can slice a model easily with sketch lines to produce the lift models for the concrete pouring sequence.With BIM 360 cloud services - also newly available - we can work better across regions and continents for design collaboration.Integrating these BIM tools with Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality technologies, we can now better visualize our design during the construction process. This presentation will present a "what if" scenario, to study how the design of this mega-project would proceed today, and to propose a new design template for the future.