Innovative pavement safety assessment through integrated BIM and AR visualization

Effective management and maintenance of pavement structures require accurate and comprehensive information on both surface and subsurface conditions to prevent risks of structural collapse. Recent advances in technologies, such as Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) and Structural Health Monitoring (SHM), combined with Building Information Modelling (BIM), provide new opportunities to gather, integrate, and analyze all these data. The use of these leading approaches allows engineers to make informed decisions throughout the lifecycle of structures, improving efficiency, sustainability, and data-driven asset management, while also enhancing safety and reliability assessment of pavements. This contribution presents an innovative approach for the advanced documentation and deterioration assessment of a flexible pavement structure. A Trace-to-IFC methodology was employed to represent asphalt layer thickness using GPR and TLS (Terrestrial Laser Scanning) data in BIM environments, the OpenBIM IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) standard was adopted to ensure interoperability and data exchange. Then, IFC-BIM models were exported to KMZ and FBX formats respectively, allowing visualization of all integrated data through Augmented Reality (AR) devices, thus enabling real-time visualization of the models and semantic information such as layer thickness. This AR-based representation offers a complementary view to the demonstrated significant value as a decision-making tool for the maintenance and rehabilitation of pavements by retaining both geometric and semantic information across different BIM and GIS (Geographic Information System) platforms.

Keywords: Building Information Modelling, Augmented Reality, IFC, visualization tool, Pavement Management System.