ASSET INFORMATION & DATA MANAGEMENT
‘We’re building two railways’
Crossrail is being built physically, but also digitally. Ross Dentten, asset information and configuration manager for the project, has done groundbreaking and industry-leading work to ensure the supply chain is ready for a ‘single source of truth’. RTM spoke to him.
C information
metaphor to describe how asset handover is typically done
between an infrastructure project’s designers or constructors and its operators – data is “thrown over the fence”.
a build nears completion is patchy, poor quality and not always trustworthy, with the operator and maintainer having to create mini-projects and do fresh surveys, “because they don’t really know what they’ve got, and they can’t make proper decisions”.
despite the
operate/maintain phase being
80-90% of a typical asset’s life, the asset information management process traditionally starts at the end of construction and beginning of the commissioning phase (with late, poor
make a good start right back during the design phase on its asset information management you get to the operational phase, there is no time to do it properly, the data isn’t trusted, and people start their own siloed approaches,”
Common data environment
25 years’ experience in the transport industry working for companies including Thales, Crossrail’s document control system early in his time there, bringing in Enterprise Bridge (eB) instead (now owned by Bentley, although it wasn’t at the time). That was based on a
58 | rail technology magazine Dec/Jan 15
business case with 80 requirements, which focused on having documents and assets ‘in the same place’. “That would cut down on integration required later on in the project,” he told us. “I went to the technical director, he approved it as the way forward, and we then got rid of the document control system we had in place and brought in eB.”
Bentley systems like ProjectWise were already in use as design tools, meaning Bentley’s “We had all our information with one supplier, management was accomplished, eB was then also selected – after another business case we’ve got documents and assets, with the right requirements, in one system. That is our
“We’re building two railways: virtual and physical. In theory, the virtual railway should lead, and the physical should follow. In reality, in the rail industry and other industries, that doesn’t always happen.
“With our ‘virtual railway’, we have documents that are related to assets. We have assets related models that are then spatially shown in our help us understand how to get from A to B.
it’s all about linking the information and data between each component. That’s what the virtual world is about – the BIM world. BIM is not just about buildings, it’s really about assets and could be called ‘better information management’.”
Asset tags
requirements early on, with contractors procuring assets against the list of known requirements. Asset tags are vital for this, each
As a programme of individual projects across more than 40 construction sites, Crossrail has a lot of asset tags: an estimated 750,000 to a to rise dramatically in 2015 now the systems assets are being designed and introduced.”
This is a key enabler for Crossrail’s asset information strategy, alongside its asset data dictionary, asset information management plan, asset information standard, contract clauses, asset pointer, and asset information provision procedure. These are underpinned
to have started even earlier, but we’re certainly very well enabled now and we’ve got the right requirements in place for the contractors to deliver what we want.
source of truth, isn’t just about being intelligent with your information: it also encourages people to collaborate in a sensible manner.”
Data on the front line
page 62, we discuss the interface between the data environment and mobile devices on the
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