The RIMcomb research project: Towards the application of building information modeling in Railway Equipment Engineering

This paper presents our research towards the utilization of Building Information Modeling (BIM) methods in Railway Equipment Engineering. While BIM is already applied in several railway infrastructure construction projects, so far, it is mainly used for construction engineering tasks, i. e. for modeling the alignment, bridges or tunnels. The RIMcomb research project targets the further application in scope of rail engineering subsections such as control and safety systems, train control systems, telecommunication systems, electric power systems, rail power supply or cable management. In this paper, we are going to give a general overview of the project and will discuss first findings of our approach to digitizing conventional technical drawings in order to translate their content into a machine-readable form.