ASSET INFORMATION & DATA MANAGEMENT
HS2 in the virtual world
RTM interviews HS2’s head of management systems, Jon Kerbey. M
any clients dream of a ‘single vendor solution’ when thinking about design and asset management, with every contractor at every tier of the supply chain using the same software or at least an interoperable solution. Integration assured, through the design, construction and maintenance phases of the project’s life cycle.
but feedback from the supply chain is forcing it to look again.
management systems Jon Kerbey said: “If we do propose a single vendor solution, then a huge raft of the supply chain will have to upskill. They’re not going to have funds for that, and we don’t have time as an industry to upskill into one vendor solution.
“It’s almost inevitable that lower tiers of the supply chain will use whatever they’re most comfortable with and trained-up to use, and it will be up to either us as the client to integrate that data, or the tier 1s will have the responsibility to integrate or translate that. We will have a multi-vendor solution, and we’ll just have to deal with that.”
‘A massive challenge’
62 | rail technology magazine Dec/Jan 15
Crossrail, is using a Bentley suite of tools currently, focused on Bentley Enterprise Bridge (eB) as one of its core products, with others also making up its ‘BIM platform’.
BIM is becoming a well-known term in rail, as it is in construction, facilities management and other sectors. It stands for ‘building information modelling’, though its proponents stress that it is not just about buildings, nor about modelling, but more about smart use of shared interoperable data, turning information into knowledge. The government is mandating information, documentation and data being electronic, on public sector capital projects by 2016.
savings through the use of BIM, but getting the supply chain to where it needs to be is the big task for this year.
Kerbey said: “We do recognise that as we’re using a Bentley product, that we’re single- vendor at the moment. All of the feedback from the supply chain conferences is that we need to try to be more agnostic in terms of our software.
“We’re working hard to ensure we’ve got processes and systems to enable us to integrate and use data from multiple vendors. [Bentley eB] may be a solution that enables us to do that,
or it might not be, so we’re going through some investigation this year into that.”
RTM asked if being more ‘agnostic’ risks fragmentation, and he acknowledged: “It’s going to be a massive challenge for us. It’s one reason why Crossrail didn’t go down the agnostic route: it’s a lot easier, from an integration and interoperability point of view, to have it all in the same format.
“As soon as you get disparate formats coming in, you have a challenge to join it all together. That’s what we’re working on at the moment. If it’s too big a risk, we’ll make a risk-based decision on how we proceed.
“We have got a big project this year to try to understand the implications of being as agnostic as we can be.”
Right from the start
the ground’ stage on phase 1 from London to Birmingham, and phase 2 to Manchester and Leeds is even further away.
But Kerbey explained: “We’ve learnt from other major projects that getting our data in order of working – of BIM and of asset information management.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108