Road pavement conditions evaluation through NDT and BIM integration

Management and maintenance of transportation infrastructures are among the top priorities for public administrations and stakeholders around the world. Throughout the infrastructure lifecycle, data about asset conditions for all parties involved must be gathered and managed to develop strategies to reduce significant failures. Nowadays, there can be a lot of variation in the ways that different asset owners and contractors collect and handle data during a road's lifecycle. Due to the lack of a structured information system and information fragmentation, pavement management is vulnerable to significant rework, information loss, assessment errors, and misinterpretation of the collected data. Furthermore, a lot of issues with road pavements can arise in their deep layers, making it challenging to identify and examine them using conventional techniques. In this context, NDT methods, such as LiDAR and GPR, have been used alongside visual and automated testing to determine the root causes of pavement failures.

Building Information Modeling (BIM) can be a useful tool in this sense, providing an environment in which to store, manage and update data related to various infrastructure assets. In this context, the main goal of BIM integration in management procedures is to incorporate lifecycle data into digital three-dimensional models of the assets of civil infrastructures. Nonetheless, the road industry still lacks standardized processes for creating, integrating, representing, and maintaining data in BIM. This poses a problem for the industry, as there are currently no effective ways for the various disciplines and players involved in a road project to share data throughout its lifecycle.

The proposed methodology combines data provided by multiple NDT sources to generate a BIM model of a road pavement, that accurately depicts its configuration even regarding its deep layers. The digital representation of such an asset can be useful in carrying out analysis of its condition in a digital and three-dimensional environment. Moreover, pavement distresses found underneath the surface can be detected and integrated into the model, providing a more thorough and detailed representation of the pavement conditions. Using BIM procedures, such as clash detections methods, an automatic analysis of which pavement layers are affected by multiple kinds of distresses can be performed. Therefore, a database of pavement distresses, the corresponding layers and their location along the infrastructure can be obtained.

The methodology was tested on real data obtained during on-site surveys carried out on an Italian highway. The results show promising insight regarding the possible advancements in management and maintenance procedures of transportation infrastructures, as implementing BIM as a tool to store and manage information regarding pavement conditions can prove to be a great support to administrations and stakeholders in Italy and worldwide. Moreover, the use of the proposed process along the integrated analyses performed by IoT sensors, such in the case of bridges, can provide a more thorough insight regarding the entire infrastructure conditions, by comparing the ones related to its different assets.

Acknowledgements

This research is supported by the Projects “SIMICOM” accepted and funded by the Lazio Region, Italy (PR FESR Lazio 2021-2027 – "Riposizionamento Competitivo RSI")