Denver International Airport in the United States is in the process of using building
information modelling to support facilities management. We’re going to tell
you more about that in a moment but first – as with all our airport BIM case studies
– here are the stats:
Denver International is the fifth busiest airport in the United States and the largest
in terms of area – covering an enormous 85 square kilometres.
Over 53 million people travel through it each year and its positioning on the map makes it a hot-spot for connecting
flights and transfers. The airports scale means that there’s a lot of built assets
to manage and the traffic it receives makes it considerably prone to wear and tear.
The airport recently added a new landmark structure at the front of their terminal combining
a railway station with a new 519 room hotel. The new facility includes numerous sustainability
features and has become a gateway for passengers arriving.
The project was designed by Gensler and Anderson Mason Dale, and has been managed by HNTB and
Parsons. The construction was undertaken by three contractors – Mortenson, Hunt and
Saunders – working as the MHS Joint Venture. By their very nature airport projects are
demanding, requiring all manner of things to be considered: from travel distances and
passenger flow, to security considerations and – in the case of the US – oversight
from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The team worked in a building information
modelling (BIM) environment, co-ordinating their information and proposals in a mutually
accessible common data environment (CDE). This enabled remote working from different
parts of the country where necessary, and ensured that the team were all singing form
the same hymn sheet – i.e. they were accessing information and making decisions upon it from
a single point of truth.
Developing in a BIM environment, the project benefitted from improved collaboration, co-ordinated
timelines and a faster construction period.
But for Denver it didn’t stop there. The Hotel and Transit Centre was sort of a warm-up
test project for a much bigger BIM effort right across the airport.
The airports operators see the benefit of having a better understanding of the facilities
they’re running in order to run them properly and get the best out of them – that means
improving the experience of the people moving through them or going to work there every
day and saving money by bringing down their running costs.
The digital picture that Denver are building is not about going out and creating 3D models
and visualisations of their entire airport. For them, having a detailed database that
informs all ongoing actions is far more important than visualisations.
It would also be quite impractical and very expensive to model the entire airport in one
go. They have a skeletal model for the whole place that is added to with more detail as
it steadily becomes available. The Hotel and Transit Centre is part of a
number of extensions and alterations that they are undertaking to improve airport operations
and increase capacity. As these occur, the model is updated and the picture of their
airport becomes ever more reliable.
In the longer term, a key benefit is the ability to do detailed feasibility studies – designing
and scoping a new element, based on a detailed “perpetual as-built” of what is currently
there. There’s no need for surveys and a reduced need for time-consuming feasibility studies.
So where do you start with something like this? Well of course the airports operators
want to convert and carry over as much data about the facility that they already have.
But getting hold of some original record data isn’t exactly a digital process.
Denver International was built in the early 1990s and opened in 1995, at a time when the
transition from hand drawing to CAD was itself still fairly new.
The result is a vast array of drawings spread across floppy disks, hard drives and filing
cabinets. If you’re one of our younger viewers then a floppy disk is basically a flimsy square
piece of plastic that acts rather like a memory stick… you know what, never mind.
The first step in Denver’s cataloguing was to bring that and over 9 million CAD files
together in one place.
In the early stages of the Hotel and Transit Centre project, the team used laser scanning
to capture the existing above and below ground conditions to better understand how the new
building and railway station would relate to them.
The first three bays of the terminal building were scanned from the roof down to the ground
and this helped to model it in great detail. The interior was mapped over three days during
the middle of the night.
The result was accurate as-built scan data that was important for the new project and
could be used in the airports ever enriching facilities management database.
Ultimately Denver International Airport want to run their entire facility from a single
source of digital information, a single point of truth, for what is what across their vast site.
They are trialling tablets to put this information into the palms of their staff and operatives,
giving them instant access to the data they need and saving time that is often lost travelling
across the terminal or airfields.
They’re also working on an automated, bi-directional information exchange between the models used
by project teams on capital works, and their Facilities Management platform.
The challenge, as one of the team put it, is in getting those delivering capital projects
to think of data as if they own it, rather than just creating a set of documents. They
need to have the mind-set that will eventually have to come back to the model, and use it
to inform future work.
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