An innovative framework for integrating Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) within Building Information Modeling (BIM)

Carrying out correctly and objectively a CBA (Cost Benefit Analysis) means planning and designing sustainable infrastructures. For the case of infrastructures, it is very important to demonstrate in the most efficient way the impacts that would result from its construction and to show them to all the involved stakeholders. In this context, the marriage between the CBA and BIM (Building Information Modeling) becomes a powerful visualization tool for stakeholders providing them a transparent summary of the costs and benefits of the project, within the evaluation analysis of the decision-making process. CBA-BIM is the union between infrastructural and transport planning which place Stakeholder Engagement as a central planning activity aiming at reducing the subjectivity of the analyses. The motivations lying behind the integrated use of the CBA with BIM are the transparency, standardization, and automatization of the decision-making process. Indeed, from their union, there should be a decrease of the costs related to the protests of the stakeholders not involved bringing unnecessary delays in the construction works. This paper shows an application of this framework, with a BIM based design approach, to the case of the Napoli-Bari High-Speed Rail corridor, currently under construction. The BIM based procedure proposed can be easily adapted to different uses according to the objectives. This work provides a contribution to the current literature since it is one of the first which considers the integration between BIM and CBA in the infrastructural context.