BIM-Based Automated Design Framework for Pavement Structures Considering Economy and Sustainability

Advanced computer information technologies are transforming the design methodologies and patterns of road infrastructure. Current pavement structure design processes heavily rely on manual decision-making and engineering experience, making it challenging to attain the optimal design solution while considering factors such as economy and sustainability comprehensively. To address this, the study explores the transformation and enhancement of pavement structure design methods within the building information modeling (BIM) environment. It introduces an automated design framework for pavement structures based on BIM. This framework enables the generation of diverse design alternatives by creating a parametric pavement structure model in BIM that allows for the verification of performance, as well as the comprehensive analysis and computational evaluation of cost and energy consumption. Subsequently, an automatic design process is proposed using a genetic algorithm, which effectively explores optimal design solutions within the decision space. The proposed framework is validated in the Phnom Penh-Sihanoukville highway project and demonstrated that compared to the initial design for expert decision, the solution generated by the framework achieves 23.82% cost savings and a 39.21% reduction in energy consumption.