The Challenge
Fornebubanen is a 7.7 km long infrastructure project in Oslo with a budget of over 2.4 billion EUR. The project includes the construction of six new metro stations. More than 10,000 homes, and commercial property to support over 20,000 new jobs, are planned in the Fornebu area. This new metro is crucial for supporting growth and development in the Oslo area by providing a reliable and environmentally friendly public transportation alternative to motorized traffic.
Given the massive size of the project, the associated BIM data was extensive and probably the world’s largest BIM model to date. The consolidated project model consisted of:
- ~1200 different models from >20 disciplines, including BIM, GIS and Point cloud and formats such as IFC, DWG, GIS, GeoTif, and more
- ~10 million unique objects, each with 50-100 properties
- In total, >10 billion polygons, which each can be queried, filtered, and saved
Traditional BIM software struggled to visualize and support the federation of this large-scale model. For instance, using desktop BIM tools required splitting the model into 12 parts, leading to long upload/download times and inefficient workflows, such as slow model federation, exports, and reporting. The project’s 8 BIM Coordinators spent every Monday manually updating views and colors in the federated model – a time-consuming and tedious task. Additionally, Fornebubanen wanted to execute the project with a model-based approach to eliminate the production and use of 2D drawings.
The Solution
The project team at Fornebubanen (“Prosjektgruppen Fornebubanen”, abbreviated PGF and a joint venture between engineering service providers COWI and Multiconsult) did extensive performance testing of a long list of available BIM viewers – and selected Novorender as their viewer and central repository. Novorender supported the project with:
- Central data repository: Novorender’s ability to integrate and visualize data from diverse sources and formats greatly eliminated complexity from working in many different systems and across different manual file formats – and ensured that all stakeholders had access to consistent, updated information. Novorender integrated directly with the project’s fil hosting server (BIM360), issue management (BimCollab), as well as documentation systems (dRofus, Omega 365).
- Federated BIM model: With Novorender’s ability to stream BIM objects, it became possible to view the entire project in one, federated model instead of 12 different sections in desktop applications – greatly simplifying both model collaboration and updating. With direct integration and automatic updating from the project’s common data environment (CDE), the project team could eliminate/greatly reduce the need to manually work with large model consolidation and model checking files (NWD from Navisworks and IFC from Solibri).
- Easy access for all: Novorender’s runs directly in the browser, requires no downloads, and can be accessed on any device. This ease of access facilitated immediate and convenient review and collaboration across different locations and platforms, promoting greater flexibility and responsiveness – and ultimately contributed greatly to BIM adoption and the ability to eliminate 2D drawings in the project.
“Novorender is the most scalable BIM viewer I have ever seen, and it works perfectly on all devices. As an example, it can federate and visualize over 350 000 rebars in one view in the browser, I have not seen any other viewer able to do that”
Magne Ganz, BIM Specialist at Multiconsult
These capabilities of Novorender not only addressed the traditional data and visualization challenges associated with large-scale construction projects but also enhanced the overall efficiency and effectiveness of the planning and execution of the project.
Results
By implementing Novorender, the project is targeting a step-change in BIM adoption, have fully-implemented the model-based approach, and fully automated thousands of hours of yearly work on manual tasks:
- 10x increase in BIM adoption: the project team is targeting to grow adoption of the federated model from 10s to 100s of users
- Eliminated 2D drawings: the project continues to be executed 100% model-based meaning that there are (virtually) no 2D drawings
- The tedious work of updating the federated model, previously occupying every Monday each week, has been fully-automated, freeing up time for value-adding activities – and ultimately saving Fornebubanen thousands of hours each year
“Novorender has been a game-changer on the Fornebu project by increasing BIM adoption, improving efficiency in model federation, and improving quality because everyone has access to the same updated models.”
Signe Lakså, Digital Collaboration Manager at COWI.
