Digital regulations for the planning and testing of railway bridges
How can complex technical regulations be prepared in such a way that they can not only be read in digital planning and testing processes, but also applied in a structured manner? This is precisely where the mFUND project SmartBridgeRules comes in. The aim of the project is to make the technical regulations for railway bridge construction, which have been predominantly text-based up to now, digitally usable, thereby significantly improving planning, testing, and approval processes.

The project is funded by the Federal Ministry of Transport (BMV) with a total of €185,935 as part of the mFUND innovation initiative.

Challenge: Analog regulations in digital processes

In practice, planners and testing agencies today have to manually evaluate and interpret extensive regulations. This leads to high time expenditure, repeated coordination requirements, and avoidable errors. At the same time, the digitization of planning, for example, through Building Information Modeling (BIM), continues to advance without regulations being systematically integrated into these processes.

New approach: Machine-readable rules for BIM models

SmartBridgeRules takes a new approach: The contents of technical regulations are systematically structured, prepared in a machine-readable format, and linked to BIM-based planning models. This forms the basis for formalized testing rules and standardized information requirements for digital bridge models.

Using real bridge model data, it is shown how rule compliance can be checked at an early stage, in a traceable and semi-automated manner. The results are expected to be higher planning quality, more transparent testing processes, and more efficient approval procedures – and thus an important step toward consistently digital planning and testing procedures in railway bridge construction.

The results will be published as open data and made available via Mobilithek. This will allow them to be used beyond the scope of the project and provide impetus for further digital applications in the infrastructure sector.

Strong partners from research and practice

The project partners are Ruhr University Bochum, Dresden University of Technology, and BUNG Ingenieure AG. DB InfraGO AG, DB Systel GmbH, and the Association of Consulting Engineers (VBI) are involved as associated partners.

About the BMV's mFUND:

As part of the mFUND innovation initiative, the BMV promotes data-based research and development projects for the digital and connected mobility of the future. Project funding is supplemented by active professional networking between stakeholders from politics, business, administration, and research, and by the provision of open data on the Mobilithek platform. Further information can be found at www.mFUND.de and daten.plus.