Tunnels and Underground Cities: Engineering and Innovation meet Archaeology,

Architecture and Art – Peila, Viggiani & Celestino (Eds)

© 2019 Taylor & Francis Group, London, ISBN 978-1-138-38865-9

Digital engineering on the Sydney Metro

R. Dickenson & B. Harland

Mott MacDonald, London, United Kingdom

ABSTRACT: Australia has no government mandate for digital projects in the construction
industry. The Sydney Metro represents a significant step forward for digital engineering on
major projects in the Australasian transport sector.
Programme and cost benefits were achieved by coordination in 3D across all subcontracts
and the client: eliminating unnecessary production of drawings and facilitating client review
directly in a federated model.
The design programme was integrated within the Common Data Environment, enabling
advanced analytics and monitoring. Rigorous model requirements for Uniclass classification
and COBie deliverables were achieved, providing a foundation for the rest of Sydney Metro
and beyond. The effective deployment of virtual reality gave next-level customer engagement
and crucially, design feedback from the public early enough to make a difference.
This paper provides a practical summary of these and other digital engineering elements,
and champions the value gained by taking a project digital by default.

1 INTRODUCTION

1.1 Opportunity: strong foundations in a mixed-up industry

Australia has had no government mandate for digital projects in the construction industry,
and as a result the field of digital engineering has been fractured and diverse. This has led to
innovations and the evolution of new solutions among technical experts, but it has hampered
uptake of digital ways of working in a broader sense. Digital collaboration in the construction
industry remains largely a parliament of many languages: words vary, expectations conflict,
coordination on major projects can be slow and often confused.
The Sydney Metro represents a milestone for major project digital engineering in the Aus-
tralasian transport sector: applying sound information management principles to global
standards, a best practice virtual environment, and dramatically improved use of technology
across the supply chain from client to subcontractors. By building strong digital engineering
requirements into the project, the Sydney Metro team initiated a major step forward in effi-
cient, quality and coordinated project delivery.
Mott MacDonald’s role as digital engineering lead on the Underground Stations Design
and Technical Services (USDTS) contract was to make that happen, working closely with
technical experts from joint venture partner Arcadis, and subcontractors Foster + Partners
and Architectus, among others.
An underlying foundation for the success of the project has been to acknowledge that good
digital engineering involves a profound change to traditional ways of working; a change that
involves every member of the team and can appear challenging and unfamiliar to many. New
digital ways of working therefore need to be introduced with care, appropriate change man-
agement, and adequate coaching. This paper focuses the lens on how digital engineering can
be implemented well in an environment where staff are unfamiliar or nervous. A practical
explanation of the implementation of digital engineering on the project is provided, including:

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• Programme and cost benefits achieved through full 3D coordination across all subcontracts
and the client,
• Measures to improve user-acceptance of model-based design reviews,
• Customer-centred design through virtual reality testing and early design feedback,
• Governance of work in progress model information in a common data environment,
• Automation of project collaboration processes, and
• Exploiting structured data to improve progress monitoring and project controls.

Figure 1. Concept image of Victoria Cross Station.

2 DISCUSSION

2.1 Whole supply-chain change management

In today’s industry the majority of project staff are new to the systematic collaboration pro-
cesses outlined in the new standard on information management using building information
modelling from the International Organization for Standardization (ISO, 2018a). Addition-
ally, it is common for staff of all levels to fail to understand the level of competence required
to make proper use of a modern collaboration platform. Numerous projects fall into confu-
sion because of attempts to apply old-style ‘Windows Explorer’ techniques to more compre-
hensive project information systems, or due to a belief that there is no need for systematic
collaboration processes. A whole-team change management approach is required.
Ensuring the supply chain is properly engaged may require careful updates to contracts,
diligent communication, persuasion, training and perhaps even provision of software, but it
results in strong efficiencies from well-structured and quality-assured information. It is essen-
tial that information management requirements are passed carefully to subcontractors, to
ensure the digital engineering approach remains a consistent whole.
For Sydney Metro, digital engineering systems and procedures were planned as an inte-
grated way of working across the entire supply chain, from specialist subcontractors up to the
client. All 24 organisations in the joint venture were required to use the Common Data Envir-
onment to collaborate on design information, and the federated 3D model was the centre-
point for coordination and comment exchange.
Use of multiple disparate systems for generating and managing information is common and
arguably necessary on complex transport projects. For this project, Bentley ProjectWise
and Autodesk BIM 360 were both used, but with carefully defined roles. To avoid confusion
and inefficiencies these software platforms were set-out as a single system of various connected

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parts, each of which required planning and training. Where exchange of data between differ-
ent systems required human input, effort was deliberately invested in automation.
Induction, competency management and training on the project were mandatory. Over 400
people were trained in the project’s collaboration processes and systems, and staff with digital
engineering responsibilities were assessed against a set of required skills. Any claim of ‘we
don’t work in 3D’ from organisations without prior experience was met with free software,
personalised training sessions and ongoing coaching. One specialist service provider was
carrying out virtual reality design reviews within weeks of initially making this claim.

2.2 3D collaboration
Coordination in 3D was central to the success of the station design. All interdisciplinary issues
were captured and resolved using 3D processes implemented from the start of the project.
Repeatable and scale-able processes were essential to enable tracking and accountability for
design issues within the model. The design review process was facilitated by standardising
ways of working with off-the shelf industry software.
Autodesk Navisworks has built in mark-up functionality for capturing design issues and
saving each markup as a ‘view’. The native comment tool itself has limited functionality for
tracking comment details (such as comment status), and no provision for custom metadata.
To keep the user-experience as simple and repeatable as possible across the supply chain, the
project team chose to use this software instead of other alternatives, and to rule out custom-
isation. To enhance coordination effectiveness a comment convention was developed and
included in training, along with coaching on how to write clear inter-discipline comments. The
comment convention (shown in Figure 2) enabled clear accountability, searchability and auto-
mation of analytics, and captured a full 3D audit trail of the design.
Ownership and accountability are crucial for carrying a design forward with integrity. By
holding issue owner information in the federated model, it was clear to all whose issues were
being addressed and whose were outstanding.
Automated macros were created to correct common errors in the team’s use of the comment
convention and to push the information into a database for visualisation. This enabled more
efficient prioritisation of discussion in coordination meetings and formal design reviews.

2.3 Achieving model acceptance: user-friendly federated models

Client model review was carried out in the federated model, with training, coaching and guid-
ance provided by the design team. User-friendly federated models were critical to the adoption
of model-based reviews for both the design team and the client. Unfamiliarity with 3D tools
and the new approach to design review were significant obstacles to overcome. The design
team smoothed this transition by tailoring the experience to mimic previous methods of work-
ing as far as possible within the model review tools. A standard model form was established
which contained various easy-to-navigate views for users less familiar with model tools. To
replace the traditional stack of plans a set of flat ‘drawing’ plan views were set up within every
federated model. The architectural drawings were spliced into the models, displaying details
from the drawings such as room names and vehicle swept paths (Figure 3). Standard views
including the drawing details could then be marked up in the same way as a PDF, but the
markups fed into the single auditable design history stored within the model. From this

Figure 2. Comment convention used in Autodesk Navisworks.

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Figure 3. Standard federated model with spliced general arrangement drawing (left), system view (right).

baseline the skills to take advantage of the other benefits from 3D functionality are then more
easily developed by reviewers. This introduction to model review proved to be a soft gateway
to new ways of working, without enforcing advanced coordination processes in an intimidat-
ing manner.
The standard form model also contained key area/room views for quick reference. These
were shown with a 3D camera view to give perspective on the room contents. In addition,
engineering system views showed the structure in ghost form with each system highlighted,
enabling engineers to trace the system through the station in a more intuitive manner. Stand-
ardising these views was particularly useful for describing the workings of each station to new
team members, or when presenting the designs to client subject matter experts who wanted a
quick way to understand the systems and their maintenance or delivery routes.
The elements in the federated model also contained carefully managed system and product
information according to the project element metadata schema.
Early in the project these federated models were demonstrated to be suitable for client
review at interim design milestones, in fact providing more useful information than the draw-
ings which were required by the services brief. The client agreed to hold model-based inter-
mediate design gates (with a small number of drawings). This eliminated the need for
approximately 900 drawings, shortening the programme and saving more than $1m in one
stage alone.

2.4 Governance of work in progress model information

The federated model is a valuable tool for collaboration, but it can also be a powerful dis-
tributor of design errors if the models are not appropriately checked prior to federation. For
this reason, industry standards such as ISO 19650 (ISO, 2018a, 2018b) advise careful govern-
ance of the work in progress information, including restriction of a file’s visibility until it has
been checked and approved for sharing. Restricting one discipline’s access to another discip-
line’s ‘live’ working models can appear to stand in the way of progress, because of the need to
wait for the next round of checking. However in trials on this project, the advice of the stand-
ard was found to be correct, leading to reductions in confusion, misinterpretation and prolif-
eration of errors.
Both approaches were trialed: models linking in other disciplines’ work in progress models
(using Autodesk Collaboration for Revit), and models linking in other disciplines’ checked
and approved models (drawn from ProjectWise using Bentley’s Revit Advanced Integration
tool). In the former case technicians worked in constantly evolving design models, which
meant that markups made by other staff often became unusable, and uncertainty was ampli-
fied between disciplines. This opportunity for uncertainty created delay, and left technicians
to improvise solutions that in some cases differed from the original markup’s intentions.
While a completely open approach may at times work for smaller co-located project teams, it

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Figure 4. Statistics from the common data environment.

was not optimal for a project of this scale and complexity. Figure 4 gives a sense of the scale
of the design team’s common data environment.

2.5 Customer engagement for design input

A project’s digital models can be efficiently converted for virtual reality testing, putting cus-
tomers inside the design years before it is built. This level of immersion in customer engage-
ment offers a valuable source of inspiration for excellent station design, and is particularly
relevant in underground infrastructure where members of the public more commonly express
a sense of unease or anxiety.
Working with customer centred design subcontractor ‘Symplicit’, the team used Enscape
and Unity to bring customers into the design and improve the relevance of each station to its
users. Using the digital models in place of physical prototypes not only saved money but also
obtained valuable customer insights early enough to make a difference to the design - long
before physical prototypes could have been established.
100 members of the public were recruited for testing, deliberately covering a range of perso-
nas developed to encompass Sydney Metro’s diverse array of customers. The following
examples demonstrate feedback which might never have arisen in traditional engineering
reviews:
• The arrangement of the walls beyond the gate-line at one station was amended to enhance
visibility of lift access, following feedback from people with restricted mobility.
• A teenage boy identified an area in one station where the design needed adjusting to avoid
gatherings of school groups which would obstruct pedestrian flow.
• The number of wider ticket gates was increased after feedback from parents.
• Signage was carefully tested and updated regularly to improve wayfinding.
Sadly this level of digitally enabled customer-centred design could still be considered
innovative in this industry, because in many cases in-depth customer input is still taken at
such a late stage in design that there is limited scope to incorporate the feedback.

2.6 Automation of project processes

The arrival of new technologies has come at a cost: the need for more administrative activity,
to manipulate data correctly, control its use, coordinate it to higher degrees, validate its out-
puts, visualise the results, communicate the implications and more. Despite the resulting
value, this additional burden is a significant contributor to the resistance which is commonly
felt when new technology is introduced to a team. To overcome the administrative burden of
increased technological activity, the project allocated time and budget to set up scheduled
automation for federation, clash detection, and other model collaboration processes.
Federation and clash detection was automated using iConstruct and Autodesk Navisworks.
Automation of these model-handling tasks alone is estimated to have saved the project 40
man hours per week, compared to similar tasks on the previous phase of the Sydney Metro.
Scripts and macros were also developed to:
• Dashboard statistics on deliverables and project progress,
• Manage comments in Navisworks,
• Manage parameters in the Revit models to align with project requirements (Figure 5),
• Validate completeness of non-graphical data in the models.
These scripts enabled design coordinators to focus time on design instead of administration.

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Figure 5. Dynamo script to adjust Uniclass parameters in models ready for COBie exports.

As well as support from project management, a critical resource for introducing and develop-
ing these innovations is the availability of team members with the skills and appetite to write
scripts and implement automation. Without this skillset and attitude the project would not have
been able to achieve the necessary quality of information at the efficiency required.
Good information management is essential to the smooth-running of the project but also
for achieving buy-in from the team, especially where processes are new. Cumbersome, repeti-
tive tasks will see team members reject the new working methods in favour of the old.

2.7 Making the most of structured data to plan and manage deliverables
To automate effectively, the project’s information must be structured systematically. Benefi-
cial automation of the structured data was not limited to just the models.
It is common for projects to expend significant manual effort in maintaining largely manual
records of deliverables, trying to keep a spreadsheet up to date with each deliverable’s approval
status or transmittal status. For this project such manual handling was eliminated by automatic-
ally collecting information about each deliverable as metadata against the deliverable itself in Pro-
jectWise. In this way the metadata of each file became the prime source of information about
each file. This unlocked powerful tracking, data aggregation and dashboarding capabilities.
For this project, the metadata for all deliverables in the common data environment was
exported to an external dashboard termed the Master Information Delivery Plan (MIDP),
along with corresponding metadata from the client’s document management system. The
MIDP was the central tool for planning and monitoring deliverables, functioning as a deliver-
ables schedule and statistical report on project progress.

2.8 Incorporating design programme information

Programme information such as activity IDs and due dates were associated with each deliver-
able in the following manner.
1. Each key milestone from the programme had an equivalent ‘milestone’ file in ProjectWise.
This file carried various parameters about the milestone: programme due dates for com-
ment and for approval (imported from Primavera P6), internal project due dates such as
inter-disciplinary checks (managed by station design leads), design lead name, etc.
2. All the files due for issue at one milestone were linked to that milestone in ProjectWise and
inherit the metadata from the ‘milestone’ file in ProjectWise.
3. If the programme changes and the milestone’s metadata changes, then the update can be
pushed out across ProjectWise, and all the files which have been assigned to that milestone
update their due dates too.
To efficiently align information in the programme with deliverables in the collaboration
platform, care is required to structure the data well from the start of the project. Figure 6
shows how project information is connected across various platforms and ultimately presented
in a project controls dashboard.

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Figure 6. Flow of project information.

2.9 Analytics based on deliverables information

Once information has been structured and aggregated in a consistent manner, useful project
progress analytics are easy and can be achieved in any number of ways – Microsoft Excel and
Microsoft PowerBI being common processing tools. This project used lookaheads and look-
backs (pivot tables with simple graphs) and formulas to measure ‘percentage completeness’.
The following parameters were used to estimate how ‘complete’ a deliverable is:
• Project phase (relative to the phase at which the deliverable is due),
• Approval state (work in progress/shared/published),
• Suitability code (for coordination/for review and comment/for approval and others),
• Delivery status.

2.10 Other features built into the common data environment

Table 1 below provides a summary of other smaller project information management features,
all of which combine to improve the efficiency of day-to-day working.

Table 1. Common data environment features developed for the project

Name Description Benefits

Quickshare Approval workflow feature to allow a dis- Promotes more efficient document
cipline lead to fast track the approvals sharing.
workflow for informal document shares at Empowers discipline lead to informally
low suitability codes. share documents at low suitability codes.
Distinct Distinction between users able to approve Document producers can revise a docu-
Approver/ and revise documents at specific workflow ment and continue working without reli-
Reviser states. ance on senior staff to review and revise.
permissions
Incoming infor- Approvals workflow for incoming informa- Provides assurance that the design team
mation tion ensuring proper checking prior to use are working from checked, relevant
workflow and prevents working from uninstructed or information.
superseded data.
Intelligent Pre-populated fields and rules to remove Time saving and improved metadata
document repetitive data entry and improve consist- consistency.
numbering ency in metadata. More reliable analytics due to increased
data accuracy.

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3 OUTCOMES AND RECOMMENDATIONS

3.1 Positive outcomes for the client

Experience on the project has added weight to the evidence that for major infrastructure pro-
jects there is much value in being ‘digital by default’.
Members of the client review team stated that the design had reached a level of coordination
and detail significantly surpassing what the industry in Australia considers ‘standard’ for this stage
of design. Customer input was achieved earlier in the design leading to more user-friendly designs.
Cost savings and design improvements were achieved by various means, including the elim-
ination of many interim drawings, and the application of early customer engagement to
reduce the need for physical prototypes and improve the relevance of the station designs.
Compared to other similar projects this design experienced a smaller number of client com-
ments at design review gates, thanks to enhanced understanding of the ongoing design as a
result of model-based reviews.
Sydney Metro is well known in the region as a radically digital project, and as a result
TfNSW has strengthened its position of digital engineering leadership in the industry. The
client workforce has been upskilled and is now experienced in engaging with design in a virtual
environment, with a better understanding of good information management principles.

3.2 Recommendations for further work

Development of optimal techniques for information management using building information
modelling continues apace. For infrastructure projects with lengthy timescales, the proposed
solution for the next project should never be simply a copy of the last. Based on experience on
the Sydney Metro, Mott MacDonald recommends the following three areas of focus as fruit-
ful areas for further work.
Model applications for requirements management: Examples have been carried out to show
how a federated model can be used in various ways to connect requirements to their design
elements, demonstrate compliance with requirements and justify deviations, all to better effect
than drawings and diagrams. Further work is recommended to achieve smart linking between
requirements and the models. Links may connect requirements to model element metadata,
model views, classification schemas, or all three. Legal questions which may arise from reli-
ance upon models in this manner should also be closed out.
Improved model-based coordination tools: Various software vendors are rapidly improving
model-based coordination tools, particularly focused on cloud applications for organisations
which cannot easily roll out software such as Navisworks or Navigator. Much value has
already been identified in tools which can be seamlessly integrated into design review processes
without requiring laborious changes to users’ computer software.
Automated model validation: The joint venture developed bespoke algorithms which rip
data from models and measure it against requirements. Since this work a greater number of
third party tools has become available to audit digital models. For improved consistency and
efficiency, further work is recommended on streamlining, standardising and making available
these automated interrogation and validation processes.

REFERENCES

International Organization for Standardization. 2018a. ISO 19650-1:2018 Organization and digitization
of information about buildings and civil engineering works, including building information modelling
(BIM) – Information management using building information modelling – Part 1: Concepts and prin-
ciples. Geneva: ISO.
International Organization for Standardization. 2018b. ISO 19650-2:2018 Organization and digitization
of information about buildings and civil engineering works, including building information modelling
(BIM) – Information management using building information modelling – Part 2: Delivery phase of
the assets. Geneva: ISO.

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