Maciej Rochel

Since BIM (building information modelling) emerged as the standard for project preparation, there has been a demand for rapid compliance-checking. This article explains this issue in railway building projects; it focuses on establishing a common ground for the creation, verification, and management of EIR (exchange information requirements). Using examples from European railway projects, the authors illustrate how EIR structures and standards can vary. The paper demonstrates basic requirements to ensure BIM models comply with contracting authorities’ requirements thus supporting effective planning for the design, construction, and operation phases. The study also reviews existing requirements, engineering processes, and testing methods, creating a link between BIM and software-engineering practices such as unit testing, system testing, and integration testing to ensure comprehensive model validation. By highlighting the use of buildingSMART Open BIM standard, such as information delivery specifications (IDS) and industry foundation classes (IFC), the study illustrates their role in the automated or semi-automated compliance verification. The research results showed the limitations of the verification tools and methods that are currently being used in the industry, emphasizing the need for further advancements in computer-aided verification. Presented coverage percentages are based on a limited set of EIR documents and tool assessments; these values should be considered to be estimates based on specific assumptions and not definitive generalizable results.

This paper aims to find common and universal naming convention for files to allow for the efficient exchange of data within the construction industry. Since building information management (BIM) has become a norm on the market and new technologies are rapidly driving the concept, there is a noticeable lack of unification in the deliveries of projects. The analysis focuses on exploring the most common naming conventions that have been mostly defined in the national standards and explores the widely adopted British National Annex 2 to BS EN ISO 19650-2:2018. Part of this research is a survey that was undertaken among professionals to understand the needs and habits that are related to file-naming. Furthermore, the ergonomics, comfort of use, and information capacity of the naming system were examined. Based on all of these, the authors suggest an optimal file-naming convention for building construction projects, which should help the industry in efficiency gains. In the future, there is the potential of developing a form to define project needs at the very start or tools for checking naming compliance with a proposed structure.

Elements of the tramway track that require special attention in the design and maintenance of the tramway infrastructure are sharp curves (curves with small radii). In such places, there are a number of unfavourable operational problems, which are discussed in the article below. It describes the characteristics of such geometric elements and analyses the interaction of the wheel-rail system. Moreover, the most important operational problems are presented, such as the wear of wheels and tramway rails, the buckling of the rails, and noise and vibrations occurring during the passage of the tram. Methods of reducing unfavourable phenomena occurring on curves in the tramway infrastructure were also highlighted.