Engineers on Fremantle’s Swan River Crossings Project didn’t just design a bridge. They built it virtually in Revizto down to the smallest detail, enabling interrogation, stress-testing, sequencing and refining it before heading to site, leading to major cost and time savings.
As the Fremantle Bridges Alliance (FBA) delivered the Swan River Crossings Project, live operations on the Fremantle Traffic Bridge had to be maintained. The new structure was built at the same location and largely within the same alignment, on a constrained 250 m bridge footprint, all while maintaining live boat and ferry operations beneath the bridge.
To add to the challenge, the bridge design itself was a first in Australia.
“It is Australia’s first extradosed bridge,” said Adam Booth, Project Digital Leader at Laing O’Rourke. “The bridge is unique in its construction form.”
From day one, the FBA adopted a “planned, governed and value driven approach to digital delivery”, Booth said, ensuring alignment with client requirements including safety, schedule compression, constructability, cost management and stakeholder engagement.
Digital strategy requirements included detailed modelling and design review, 4D staging and sequencing to prove construction methodology and guarantee timelines, and digital tracking of material quantities through the design phase.
At the centre of that strategy was Revizto.
One project, one place, one view
It wasn’t so long ago that designers and engineers would manually align large-format drawings on tables or floors to understand the big picture.
Ian Mackinnon, Enterprise Industry Consultant with Revizto, recalls similar practices.
“The culture was to have a 6 m rollout plot, an acetate sheet of clear plastic and whiteboard markers, and the only digital component was when they took a photo of it, then printed that photo for collaboration,” he said.
Today, that process has evolved into an integrated 2D and 3D digital collaboration environment. On the Swan River Crossings Project, all permanent works, temporary works and shop drawings are hosted in a single digital collaboration hub.
“It’s our single source of truth,” Booth said. “It allows a dimension of inquisition not possible with 2D options.”
The FBA’s documented drawing workflow, from preliminary model review through clash detection, shop drawing review and request for information/redline mark-up, was managed directly within Revizto.
The impact was not just around administration efficiencies, it reached as far as stakeholder engagement, safety validation and cost reduction.
“By doing VCR walkthroughs, within the first week we identified cost savings of around $300,000 because of things we identified that would have caused problems and delays,” Booth said. “The cost savings were not hypothetical.”
Enabling aligned infrastructure at scale
While Swan River is a single bridge, Mackinnon sees far broader implications of Revizto’s capabilities for corridor-based infrastructure engineering, and a powerful laboratory to develop the software.
“We’ve got one project that’s 800 km long,” he said. “What’s best for the user is if that is all in one environment they can travel through in one platform, but which can also be split into whatever stages the user requires.”
Projects can still be broken down into smaller pieces. In fact, they can be interrogated down to the level of what type of bolt, or light switch, etc., is being used for a particular application. Most important though, is the fact that it’s all integrated in one digital space, meaning effects of changes can be seen along the entire pathway.
Imagine the line-of-sight change for a train driver travelling at 100 km/h due to a small adjustment to the rail’s alignment. Will they have the time or the ability to see signals or crossings?
“If an alignment changed or a signal position changed, that typically meant you’d have to go back to square one and rework all of those lines of sight based on new designs,” Mackinnon said. “Now, you don’t.”
With the introduction of Linear Navigation capabilities in Revizto, the design, analysis and delivery process can be interrogated and significantly streamlined.
Iteration and design review time is reduced when engineers create search sets and automate checks to identify spatial conflicts, for example. Enormous cost and time benefits lie in performing these checks prior to procurement.
Constructability and safety
“Rework, on site, can potentially be an expensive part of any project that can be mitigated,” Mackinnon said. “By bringing this into a virtual world, and resolving the problems before they get on site, it’s benefits not only affect cost, but more importantly time and safety.”
On the Swan River Crossings Project, safety considerations were also modelled in detail to mitigate against the potential human cost of construction. Pre-designed, engineered safety interventions included lifting wings, transverse post-tensioning access and temporary blisters to reduce working at height.
For Australian engineers and construction workers on road, rail and utilities projects, digital new capabilities reduce iteration time, simplify design review processes, enhance safety and engage stakeholders.
The project’s successes and “Australia first” outcome have been made possible by leveraging the principles of digital engineering and modern methods of construction, key elements of Laing O’Rourke’s DNA. The FBA team are bringing this thinking to life on the project, supported by the use Revizto to deliver the digital strategy.
Having used Revizto from the start of the Swan River project, the new bridge is close to completion. For the Australian engineering community its delivery signals the power of digital platforms not as add-ons, but instead as structured, project-wide collaboration hubs.
“As my project director said, we simply cannot build this bridge without Revizto,” Booth said.
