BIM Application in Projects and Works in the City of Curitiba

MARCIO TEIXEIRA: Hi. I'm Marcio Teixeira, civil engineer. I work at the Curitiba urban planning agency. I have 18 years of experience with urban planning. [INAUDIBLE] projects of urban mobility and transport. Since 2003, I am Director of UTAG, [INAUDIBLE] unity, [? affiliated ?] urban planning agency of Curitiba.

JAQUELINE PIMENTEL: Here we go and see the agenda of this presentation. First, let me present myself. And I'm Jaqueline. I'm a civil engineer, too. I work at UTAG with Marcio. And I work as a consultant. I have more than 10 years of experience with project management. And my focus is innovation and processes implementation.

And our agenda in this presentation, we will talk about urban planning in Curitiba, talk a little bit of the current context, and a bit of the history of Curitiba as being laboratory, and roadmap of BIM consulting, and some BIM implementation actions that we are making.

MARCIO TEIXEIRA: Urban planning in Curitiba, how it started. Curitiba has a rich history of urban planning that significantly influenced its development and sustainability. The [INAUDIBLE] approach, especially in the implementation of public transport and green spaces. Curitiba serves as a model for other cities worldwide.

Curitiba's urban planning began in the '40s with a focus on the organized growth and efficient land use. The city adopted a master plan approach, integrating transportation and land development to accommodate rapid population growth.

This image show with Curitiba [INAUDIBLE] bus rapid transit. [INAUDIBLE] of land use policies became for a first experience of transit-oriented development on the word. TOD is the urban planning model where public transport is the promoter of development. Innovations like the BRT system revolutionized public transportation, showcasing an efficient, inclusive approach. Despite its success, the city has encountered challenges, including rapid population growth, economic disparities, and the need for continual adaptation to climate change.

Curitiba has [INAUDIBLE] various mechanisms to support sustainable growth. And an alternative to solve the challenges was to search for international funding. Now, the city is holding three big, structural, urban works programs.

First, Curitiba sustainable urban mobility from the IDB, International Development Bank. Investment-- $134 million. The overall objective of the program is to improve urban mobility in Curitiba by increasing passenger demand for public transit in the city. It will improve integration of the system with other modes of transport and increases the accessibility of pedestrians. In addition, there are [INAUDIBLE] creating exclusive bus lanes to increase the bus velocity in some parts of the intertube line.

The second bus rapid transit [INAUDIBLE] rideability improvement project for NDB, New Development Bank. Investment-- $94 million. The [INAUDIBLE] is to implement an express line in the East-West transport corridor. The objective is to reduce user travel time.

Climate risk management project-- new neighborhood of Caximba from the EFD, development [? French ?] agency. Investment-- $52 million. The objective of this program is to improve the living conditions of hundreds of families who illegally occupied a government area. [INAUDIBLE] and new housing are being planted from 2,000 low income families.

To manage our programs, the technical administrative management unit is a management unit created to serve these programs. This unit is a condition of banks' agreement to ensure efficient contractual conduct and operation. Our work consists of carrying out administrative holdings, construction management, quality management, and environmental and social management.

JAQUELINE PIMENTEL: Let me show you a little of the history of Curitiba's BIM lab. [INAUDIBLE] action on the way to innovation. In this context, [? in parallel, ?] Curitiba created a BIM lab in 2018 under the auspices of the [? PMC, ?] the city's urban planning agency, to incorporate the methodologies into urban planning. This initiative was crucial in formalizing the use of digital technologies into city's planning practices, enhancing efficiency and accuracy in project development.

Moreover, [INAUDIBLE], the Brazilian federal government still in 2018 has established an overall objective in its strategic civil construction agenda. Intensify the use of information technology applied to construction projects by disseminating BIM methods.

On this slide, there is the timeline of LaBIM. And you can see in 2018, we had some software acquisitions and first acquisitions and training-- software acquisitions and training courses initiated. In 2019 we had LaBIM's creation and state government cooperation for exchanging experience with BIM implementation.

And 2020 we had, with the same funding program that Marcio said, we had the idea of the IDB. We faced the first hiring experience of a big project, but it was not conceived in BIM. Because our lack of knowledge, the contract guidelines were not sufficiently delimited. Then the project was designed and first in 2D and later in 3D. That is, it did not effectively follow the BIM methodology, as well as the ICC models did not include reliable data. However, it was a good experience to see what points we would have to improve on the next contracts.

And the next year, 2021, with the [? IDB ?] program, we hired two independent consultants with a great knowledge to helping the municipality to map actions for BIM implementation. And these consultants also helped to develop our BEP, which was thought specifically on the type of municipality workflows and projects. Then the consultants also conducted more training courses for the municipality employees.

And 2022, more training courses. And we provided the first oversight guide for BIM project to help the responsible team supervise the project design.

Well, in 2023, a BIM external consultancy acquisition has been made. And the overall objective is to promote BIM implementation actions by developing a roadmap for these actions in addition to the independent consultants.

And 2024 and the beginning of this year, we had our first successful case of hiring in the development BIM for the project, which the BIM method was followed fully. The external consultancy [INAUDIBLE] the municipality BIM implementation plan that provides 10 years of actions to continue improving our workflows. And also, we have more training courses.

I will talk a little about the next slides about the roadmap. And 2024, 2025-- and then for the next year, we will provide more team qualification and more software and equipment acquisition.

And 2026, the external consultancy we went. And in the future, the municipality. We will continuously act by the roadmap definitions. And as I mentioned, in 2034, the roadmap limit ends.

Well, here we brought some pictures of the evolution of the lab and how it is today in comparison in the past. We have more equipment and engagement people on this. We have a picture in this year of our training courses, of a training course.

Well, now I will talk a bit about some milestones of the roadmap that [INAUDIBLE]. As I said before, the objective of it was to map actions for implementing BIM on all the city agencies. And for that [INAUDIBLE] established some milestones, as you see in this slide.

In the short term, basically this year, 2024, we had the creation of a BIM core group at all the city agencies. We expand contracting structure for-- we are expanding contracting structure for BIM projects and running a pilot BIM project.

In a middle term, next year, until 2024, we will deploy a [INAUDIBLE] for the [INAUDIBLE] works processes for BIM project, BIM budgets methods implementation, execute works of a pilot BIM project, and contracting structure for assets maintenance services, ran a pilot for assets maintenance, and a long term 2029 until 2034, process implementation for sustainable analysis of projects, processes implementation for analysis for urban planning, urban licensing, and citizen-based consolidation and expansion of traffic simulations analysis by CIM models and consolidation. And we'll see the consolidation of BIM life cycles all over the city.

This section will present for you a bit of some CIM and BIM practices in the city of Curitiba. Well, BIM integration Curitiba follows the phased approach, beginning with pilot projects to test workflows and technology. This method allows for gradual scaling, ensuring that lessons learned inform future implementations. In this section, we will present some practical examples.

By the way, it's worth highlighting in this innovation context that last year in 2023, Curitiba won the smart city awards at the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona. This award acknowledges leading urban innovation projects from around the world. And it recognizes the city as an example of forward-thinking, smart city with its extensive public transportation system and innovative waste management strategies. Its ongoing projects aim to integrate technology for better community engagement and urban planning.

So now I will mention some CIM and BIM implementation actions carried out in projects conducted by the city of Curitiba. And on this slide, you see Geo Curitiba, an innovative platform designed to provide maps, applications, and geographic data for the city. It serves as a crucial tool for urban planners and residents, enhancing transparency and accessibility of territorial information. This platform is public and every citizen can access and brings together applications, panels, maps with customized functions, and geographic data essential for effective territorial management.

We all know that geographic data is essential for urban planning. And as it informs decisions related to land use, infrastructure development, and resource allocation. And accurate data enables planners to identify trends and challenges, ensuring that cities evolve in a sustainable manner.

And one step to accessing these accurate data is to build a 3D city map by cloud points acquired by laser scanning or photogrammetry. Nowadays, Curitiba, all this data has been acquired by laser scanning. And because of the precision of the technique with it, we have greater data collection and a wealth of details which are essential for the trust of the collected data.

So making drawings and models from an analysis of existing buildings and land opens the door to the strategically positioning of buildings, roads, and other crucial elements that help a smart city to realize its real potential. We all know that accurate 3D mapping is important, even essential [? set ?] for the smart city concept.

As you can see, we brought this video is an example of 3D city map demonstrating the volumetric data designed by InfraWorks. This information can support the study of design impacts on neighborhood.

In addition, this too is being developed to also identify some expropriations data like the land and the [INAUDIBLE] values, building values, and some other important information of local residents, which will help the decision making of urban planners.

And now we will show some examples of projects modeled for community engagement. This is a project of urban road overpass. And the significant changes would generate [INAUDIBLE] in the population. And so it's a way to present the plan changes to the community and the project outcomes. And for that, you can see you use InfraWorks, Autodesk InfraWorks, Autodesk Civil 3D, and Autodesk Revit.

This is the project of urban road overpass. And the significant changes we generate left doubts in the population. So it's a way to present the planned changes to the community and the project outcomes. And to do this, we use softwares like Autodesk InfraWorks, Civil 3D, and Autodesk Revit.

And with the same project, we also offer the community a QR code through the free online Autodesk Viewer platform. And this allows anyone to navigate and explore the project. If you like, you can access the QR code. You can scan the QR code and can access this project that we are showing.

And here is another example of this use of Autodesk Tools, InfraWorks, Civil 3D, with the same application to community engagement to show for the community how the project will be constructed. And it's a bus station project. And it serves to these affected people for the community and [? understanding ?] interventions.

So here is another example of a proposed for community engagement, but in a recent case the city uses to resolve conflict. This project planned interventions in a [? linear ?] park, which is a very wooded area. And the local population dubbed the need to implement the project at a time when the trees needed to be removed for the construction works initiated.

This fact generated popular commotion. And it was necessary to demonstrate the project results and that most of the trees would remain. Here you can see on the video the trees that are going to be suppressed, represented by the red color, and the trees that will remain in green. This, too, is an excellent way to improve the community engagement.

And as I said before, this year, we had our first successful experience with a 4D BIM modeling and partially 5D. And knowing [INAUDIBLE] model is a 3D model combined with the time factor, it allows the visualizing of the construction work sequence, consequently facilitating the understanding of the production and procedure by those involved in the process management.

In this video, we see the main groups or groups of tasks. They were subdivided for simulating the construction steps. And this model also has the cost dimension enabling to the understanding of the construction budget with it.

Now we have a well-developed, [INAUDIBLE] model. And it will be our construction pilot of a BIM project. We will contract and supervise the engineering services from design to construction using a BIM model for the first time. And we can see the benefits of it [INAUDIBLE] that we pretend to realize next year. Of course, it will be a challenge for us. But it's important and necessary. And we are anxious for that.

in this context, I will show you some practices of innovation in our construction management workflows. And I'm going to talk about document management, specifically about the benefits of its implementation, because it's really a situation that we live in.

Talking about one of our job activities, which is project scope management, this tool is one of the first that we have implemented as an innovation. And it's essential for the organization of the document and especially for improving communication beyond the involved people.

Before that, we used to deal with many communication gaps because the data was not centralized. As well, as several kinds of ways for document transmission. As you can see, we use to receive project documents by CDE, [INAUDIBLE] and even WhatsApp, which increases a lot the lack of communication. And [? being sure ?] about the actualized data or project information increases significantly when the workflows does not have a common data environment. So by implementing Autodesk Docs, as a CDE, we start to bring together all the project data workflows and teams into one common data environment.

Here you have an illustration of the use of Docs platform with the project documents organized and with the real stats information, which is essential for the stakeholders to see the effective version of the document and especially for the construction works team.

As I've already mentioned, one of our activities in [INAUDIBLE] is to oversee the quality of the construction works. And one specific task is to verify the non-conformities of the work services at the management level, as if it were a customer view. And for this, today you use spreadsheets from Excel, which makes the workflows complex, because there are many manual tasks. So we are on the way to contracting and implementing the Autodesk build, which will improve the teams' productivity, streamline the workflows, reduce communications gap, and improve a lot the decision making.

An example, here I brought an example of the use of issues that can be appointed by the construction works team and be instantaneously checked by the design project team. Even this is essential for organized information about the project and also helps them to reduce the communication gaps in the project revision workflow, one of the most workflows that we have here.

And here we have a photo of our team which already uses tablets or mobiles to access and see the projects and also to fill the non-conformities spreadsheets that you saw on the previous slide. In the short-run, they use these same gadgets to access Autodesk platform to point out projects and quality construction issues.

So thinking about the future and the benefits that we expect with these actions that we present here, we expect more collaboration, traceability, and history of information and hence, teams' productivity, data portability, and also data visualization and analysis. Here we have, for example, the illustration of project information centralized in BI panels and improving the analysis of its data. And in the short-term, we intend to integrate Autodesk software data with these kind of panels to increase our efficiency in project management and always looking ahead.

So this is our presentation. I hope you like it. I'm very grateful for being invited by Autodesk to be here. I appreciate your attention. And in the name of Curitiba, thank you very much.