Panama Canal is one of the world’s most important waterways handling some 5% of all
global trade. It links the Atlantic and Pacific oceans by cutting through Panama in Central America.
This shortcut has made the world smaller, and Panama quite a bit smaller
The canal has been operating at capacity for some time and has been going through a $5.25BN
USD expansion programme since 2007. These are the largest works on the waterway since
its original construction and have created some 30,000 jobs. It involves the deepening
of channels at the Atlantic and Pacific entrances, the deepening of shipping lanes in Culebra
Cut and Gatun Lake, the raising of Gatun Lake’s maximum operating level and – at the core
- the $3.2BN USD “Third Set of Locks” project.
This is one of the world’s largest civil engineering schemes. When completed in 2016
– and after a staggering 4.4 million cubic meters of concrete have been poured – the
new locks will be 40% longer and 60% wider than the original locks and allow the waterway
to eventually double its shipping capacity. The design is required to withstand major
earthquakes. The project has advanced seismic design state-of-practice and the lock gates
alone contain some 50,000 tonnes of steel.
Panama Canal’s expansion is one of the first large-scale civil engineering projects to
use BIM and it really has benefitted the scheme at every stage. The project team is formed of
a number of leading international contractors and consultants from around the world. MWH Global lead the design
process under a joint venture (JV).
At tender stage, MWH modelled several different design options and produced visualisations
which helped the client understand the proposals and enabled them to take more informed decisions.
The scale of this project means that MWH are collaborating with design teams in five different
offices around the world and working on numerous elements simultaneously. The use of information
models, hosted in an accessible online common data environment (CDE) has allowed this
diverse team of engineers to better collaborate and co-ordinate their information.
Combining design information models in this way has helped to resolve design conflicts
and discrepancies before construction saving time and money. Purely on the graphical side,
the 3D models have given the team powerful insight into the large and highly complex designs.
Despite these design-phase advantages, BIM adoption at Panama Canal hasn’t been entirely
wholesale, largely because of the project’s length. The period between 2007 and 2016 has
seen BIM steadily become developed and understood around the world. Standards and technology
has been moving on and the project team have been learning
along with the rest of us.
Whilst the designers have worked within a BIM environment, construction-issue information
was extracted and presented to the contractors in a more conventional way, largely to meet
the demands of the programme. In graphical terms, that meant 2D drawings, cut from the 3D models.
This is quite common for those at the start of their BIM journey, and is all part of taking those first steps.
But to see ultimate value everyone needs to be working in the same way.
The design team would have liked to link structural and hydraulic intelligence analysis into their
models and are keen to do so on future civil engineering projects. Unfortunately it proved
a step too far at Panama.
The information models have had their uses beyond the design team. The data has enabled
some rough take-offs for the purposes of estimating and the 3D representations have helped contractors
to really visualise and understand proposals. The complex layouts of the mechanical and
electrical installations for example were visually presented, helping contractors understand what was happening quickly
and efficiently.
The Panama team want to link the work they are doing in asset creation with asset
management. They’re using their BIM workflows to capture asset information for the end-user
and physically tagging elements with ID tags for inclusion in a master maintenance manual.
These unique ID tags are like barcodes, enabling users to scan elements of the locks in the
field and be presented with the digital data that relates to them.
The delivery phase is actually relatively short when you consider the life of the canal,
which will span many decades. By ensuring that the rich data collated during design
and construction can support the end-users facilities management approach, the canal
will be able to operate with enhanced efficiency over time. The users will truly understand
their asset and how it works, optimising its use. When you consider the importance of the Panama
Canal to global trade, that optimal use really could benefit us all.
MWH believes they made a significant step forward in their design process by adopting
BIM at Panama, and are already applying their learning to other major infrastructure projects.
Indeed both the timing and scale of Panama’s Canal expansion have placed it on the leading
edge of case studies for BIM in infrastructure.
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