Collaborative Platform for Railway Projects - Business Needs Analysis and Their Formalization as Functional Requirements

Task 1.7, “Collaborative BIM platform for railway projects”, within Work Package 1 “BIM” (Building Information Modeling) of the MINERVE project, has as its main objective the proposal of a minimum baseline of specifications for the development of collaboraAve platforms. These platforms should enable project management not only from the perspective of a single stakeholder, but from that of all stakeholders across the sector, ranging from the project owner to the infrastructure manager. The first step consisted in conducting a survey aimed at collecting the needs of the sector’s stakeholders and formalizing them into functional requirements to be integrated into the final deliverable of Task 1.7. A series of 21 interviews was conducted between October and December 2022, during which 35 individuals were consulted. The main professional roles were represented, along with the various actors involved in design, construction, and maintenance: project owners, project managers, construction companies, and infrastructure managers. These interviews were conducted by SNCF Réseau and CentraleSupélec | Université Paris-Saclay, following a protocol designed to elicit both the needs of the respondents and the guiding principles that structure the production of the different trades and their collaboration in a railway infrastructure project (Chapter 3). An analysis of these interviews, carried out as a survey, is presented in Chapter 4. Finally (Chapter 5), these interviews and analyses were synthesized into the definition of a conceptual model for the final deliverable of Task 1.7, as well as into the formulation of five families of functionalities that this final deliverable must provide, detailed in this report: (i) Provide access to existing data, (ii) Accelerate the execution of repetitive tasks, (iii) Verify the project’s essential requirements, (iv) Provide decision-support capabilities, (v) Foster mediation between stakeholders. In the continuation of the MINERVE project, these functional families will first be refined for each professional role and then integrated into an iterative process leading to the production of the final deliverable for Task 1.7.