02 December 2014

David Owens, Costain Design and BIM Manager on the Highways Agency’s A556 Knutsford to Bowdon Improvement Project, recently presented to the Institution of Civil Engineers’ Building Information Modelling (BIM) Conference about the project.

The event, which is in its fourth consecutive year, welcomed over 400 delegates to hear presentations and case studies from some of the top names in the industry.  This year the event focussed on ‘creating the best digital engineers in the world’ through the implementation of BIM across the supply chain, offering best practice case studies, updates and cross sector comparisons.

The British Government has said it wants BIM to be employed on all centrally procured Government contracts from 2016, and it has called on the industry to meet the challenge. David, who earlier this year joined the influential BIM 4 Infrastructure (UK) advice group, attended on behalf of Costain and delivered a presentation detailing both a digital prototype of the proposed A556 works and the progress the Highways Agency has made in the same period.

“There were big shoes to fill after Andy Watson (Highways Agency Divisional Director) presented last year, however both the Agency and we, as a project team, feel we’ve made some massive strides towards Level 2 and we really wanted to share it with the audience,” said David.

The new 4-mile dual carriageway will run between Junction 19 of the M6 near Knutsford and Junction 7 of the M56 near Bowdon, taking traffic away from local villages. Work is currently underway, with the new link road expected to open in 2016/7. The contract follows the completion of the Early Contractor Involvement phase of the scheme.

The A556 is a Highways Agency Early BIM Adopter project which needs to meet the UK Government's requirement for Level 2 BIM Maturity as part of an Agency-wide BIM strategy. David was instrumental in helping to devise a BIM coordination model linked to asset data from an external database. The external data can then be embedded into the BIM coordination model at any point to give a snapshot of the project to facilitate Field BIM, where contractors can link further construction data to the model.

Costain has embraced BIM, deploying it on a number of high profile projects. The technology enables collaboration and co-ordination between all parties and the sharing of asset information between the customer and the supply chain throughout the lifecycle of an asset, allowing for informed, intelligent decisions to be made. BIM is also critical to the successful implementation of a wider offsite manufacturing strategy.

Commenting on David’s presentation, an ICE BIM spokesman said: “The feedback this year has been very positive and David’s presentation rated as one of the highest amongst the delegates, with many people selecting it as their highlight of the day.”

 

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