Amsterdam’s municipality wants to guarantee the integral road tunnel system’s future management and maintenance and has therefore started the Amsterdam Road Tunnels Action Programme. This program will tackle three tunnels and the traffic control centre. The municipality has asked Tunnel Engineering Consultants (TEC, an enduring partnership between Royal HaskoningDHV and Witteveen+Bos) to support this program in the coming years.TEC has hired Infranea as a partner to support BIM, 3D design and Digital Twin development.
TEC, together with Infranea, will support and advise the municipality within the program on:
- the renovation of the Piet Hein tunnel
- improving the technical installations in the Amsterdam Arena tunnel
- improving fire resistance in the Michiel de Ruijter tunnel
- modernisation of the Traffic Control Centre Amsterdam.
The work involves various disciplines such as tunnel safety, fire safety, installations, operation, control, and monitoring systems. This work will be carried out during the design, implementation and commissioning phases. The total contract extends over a period of approximately four years. On the one hand, this will contribute to tunnel safety and availability, and on the other hand, to a uniform future-oriented road tunnel system and traffic control centre.
Our approach
The programmatic approach is based on extensive digitisation. Finally, it will be assessed on the manageability, availability and security of the tunnel system. This means, among other things, that errors must be removed as early as possible in the process. Working with digital tunnel twins makes the conversations about that much easier. You can show with a Virtual Reality environment what you are doing. For example, you can show how calamities are handled and check whether the new design is clear enough for the road user. This also helps to provide insight to the competent authority and emergency services.
Based on an integrated BIM approach, which we are tackling on this project together with TEC, we work on 3D models that, on the one hand, support the design and realisation phase and, on the other hand, serve as input to develop the Digital Tunnel Twins. This Digital Tunnel Twin will serve for the virtual testing of the tunnel(s) systems, whereby errors must be brought to light as early as possible without the need for the physical tunnel. Also, for educating, training and practising, the traffic controllers (and possibly in the future tunnel manager and emergency services) will use the Digital Tunnel Twins to play an important role.
Hereby we also link up with the projects of “Centrum Ondergrond Bouwen“(COB), namely “Hinderarm renoveren” and “Digitaal aantonen“.
