A rubber safety screen falls away from a newly blasted rock at one of the many faces forming an 18-kilometer-long tunnel being built to divert traffic away from Sweden’s capital city. As well as easing pressure on Stockholm’s congested routes, the tunnel—one of the world’s longest— is introducing collaborative 3D engineering to Swedish infrastructure.
With varying degrees of digital expertise, the national highways authority Trafikverket and the designers and contractors on the $3.6-billion E4 bypass project now are embracing building information modeling in a big way, some for the first time. Even official bid documents are digital and in 3D.