Keeping a national rail network operating at optimum efficiency demands seamless collaboration, transparency and efficient use of time and resources.
The Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer Luxembourgeois (CFL) is Luxembourg’s national railway company, and the country’s largest employer. It provides the backbone of the Grand Duchy’s transport network, delivering high-performance mobility solutions.
As a public sector entity, the CFL is duty-bound to be efficient and accountable in its work, from keeping the trains running on time to keeping its infrastructure projects on schedule and within budget. To fulfil its demanding remit, the CFL’s infrastructure management team uses building information modelling (BIM) across its projects.
The CFL has created a single source of truth for its infrastructure project stakeholders, using Autodesk Docs and BIM Collaborate Pro for all its data and documents. This streamlined process powers more direct, transparent and efficient collaboration.
Gilles Pignon, head of BIM division, Infrastructure Projects department, explains that adopting Autodesk Construction Cloud was the efficient choice for the team from the outset: “The advantage was that it offered aturnkey system that enabled us to achieve our objectives more quickly than multiplying software and solutions.”
To meet its deadlines and budgets, Gilles’s team uses BIM to anticipate problems during the design phase, addressing them in model before they appear onsite.
As Henri Werdel, CFL’s infrastructure management director explained at Autodesk University 2023, “It is a question of reinvesting time during the design phase of a project to save time later and, in turn, save resources by having previously eliminated factors likely to impact the construction project.”
Having launched its first BIM pilot project in 2017, and created its BIM division in 2019, the CFL is the leader in BIM transformation and digitalisation in Luxembourg. Staying at the leading edge, it plans to host its entire railway network and its buildings in dynamic digital twins by 2035.
To create its digital twins, the CFL is building on its trove of BIM information with laser surveys of its existing railway lines. The result will be a millimetre-pefect network model that goes beyond three dimensions, offering layers of data as well.
The CFL team will be able to integrate future changes to track or buildings directly into the dynamic digital twins and use them to simulate future work with true accuracy.
GIlles explains, “The aim of a digital twin for us—and of going to Autodesk—is to have a single centralisation of all our data, and a model that allows rapid access to data. That’s the most important thing for us today.”
“Today, the future of construction is in crisis,” reflects Gilles. “I believe this crisis could have been absorbed to some extent, if the BIM process in general had been applied well in advance.
“Why is this? Because we need to improve productivity. We need to improve quality. We need to save time. And to achieve this today, we need to be able to use tools that enable us to do this.”
For Gilles and the CFL, BIM provides those tools. And BIM is allowing them to move beyond optimising the modeling construction phases, into a future where digital twins support an efficient, high-quality operational phase as well.
Having experienced BIM’s efficiency and sustainability firsthand, the CFL has become an active promoter of BIM as a construction standard at the national level. Thanks to the CFL’s pioneering work, Luxembourg will be building BIM success stories for years to come.
