Engineers from several companies and countries came together on BIM platforms for a complex road infrastructure project in Norway. They say it would have been impossible to do any other way.
European route E6 is a 3,000-kilometer highway running the entire north-south length of Norway. In some remote parts of the country the E6 is the only road, so improving and maintaining this critical route is a high priority for the Norwegian Public Roads Administration. Much of the E6 is a single lane in each direction, which leads to congestion and a higher risk of accidents at bottleneck points. Such has been the case on the 23 kilometers between Ranheim and Værnes, a busy piece of road that connects the city of Trondheim to the region’s airport. A project was kicked off in 2020 to expand this key section of the E6 from two lanes to four. It’s expected to be completed by 2025. This is not just a simple road-widening project – it’s a complete transformation. Three new highway bridges are being built (more than 800 meters in total length), three new tunnels (some 7.3 kilometers in all), and multiple overpasses and culverts.
BIM from start to finish
For the structural engineering components of this specialist project, the Norwegian road authorities called in the Spanish conglomerate ACCIONA. The multinational has worked on dozens of large infrastructure developments around the world, including other tunnels and bridges in Norway. ACCIONA’s engineering division created a design joint venture with Danish engineering consultancy Ramboll. Engineers from both companies are forerunners in the use of Building Information Modeling (BIM) and integrated the methodology into all areas and phases of the E6 project. ACCIONA’s BIM Structures Engineer
Jesús Espinós Andrés explains: “Usually during the design phase, it’s common to create models that are not detailed enough for actual construction. They don’t show all the welding details, plates and bolts,” says Espinós Andrés. “But for the E6 project, we modeled the structures in detail right from the early design phase, including every single piece of steel or rebar. The contract for the project specified that we should work in this way, as the models are used to obtain all the information needed for construction.”
