Integrating and managing BIM in 3D web-based GIS for hydraulic and hydropower engineering projects

Hydraulic and hydropower engineering projects are characterized by large scale, long construction period, complicated technology, high professional requirements, complicated management, and difficult coordination and cooperation. Due to the complex nature of these projects, the combination of a digital representation of physical and functional properties with geospatial information will yield a more reasonable solution. Hence, this study aims at the development of an integrated method and the BIM/GIS Integration Platform (BGIP) for implementing the micro- and macro-information into a unified environment without the need to convert standards or to install plug-ins. In this paper, an integrated methodology and a customized model are proposed for addressing differences in geometric visualization and coordinating transformation based on IFC formats, a rendering technique and a 4 x 4 transformation matrix. A prototype application, namely, the BIM/GIS integration platform (BGIP), is designed to serve as a testbed and is used to build a new construction tool for hydropower project construction. Finally, the feasibility and practicality of the proposed method are evaluated using a typical representative case in hydraulic engineering. The new approach offers a satisfactory scheme for resolving the inconsistencies in the storage, accuracy and operational speed of the model for combining BIM model information and GIS geospatial information.