GeoRail-Permit: A Transparent GeoBIM-Based Risk-Scoring Framework for Railway Protection-Zone Permitting in Saudi Urban Infrastructure

Construction and third-party development near operational or planned railways create coupled risks involving excavation, ground movement, utilities, vibration, temporary works, access and incomplete permit evidence. Conventional railway-protection reviews are frequently distributed across drawings, method statements, spreadsheets, correspondence and separate spatial systems. This paper presents GeoRail-Permit, a transparent GeoBIM-based framework that links work geometry, railway protection zones, asset vulnerability, construction stage and submission evidence to an auditable risk score and controlled review route. A design-science method was used to define 11 criteria, normalized weights, four risk classes and three engineering hard-stop rules. The method was tested on 48 explicitly synthetic, engineering-realistic cases and subjected to 2,000 Monte Carlo weight perturbations. The base model classified 6 cases as low, 22 as medium, 11 as high and 9 as critical. Median classification stability was 100.0%. Improving evidence completeness by two ordinal levels reduced risk scores by a mean of 3.7 points, while suppressing proximity and utility information understated scores by a mean of 5.6 points. These are computational stress-test results, not field validation. The contribution is a reproducible decision architecture for future calibration using authorized Saudi/GCC permit cases and expert review.