Overview
Digital As-Builts (DABs) are an Every Day Counts (EDC-6) initiative, originated by the Federal Highway Administration’s (FHWA) Office of Transportation Workforce Development and Technology Deployment in 2021 to help transportation professionals shift toward a digital data-oriented process for tracking, documenting, and archiving asset information created during project delivery. The EDC-6 DABs initiative focuses on enhancing access, use, and management of highway project data from design to asset management. DABs have been selected as an FHWA innovation for their proven ability to improve quality, accelerate project delivery, save costs and enhance safety.
Digital asset data includes structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data ranging from geometric objects (points, lines, polygons, surfaces, solids) and attributes (txt, xls) to proprietary/open format (DGN, DWG, SHP, GDB, XML, IFC), document/flat file (pdf, txt, csv), and unstructured data (LAS LiDAR, JPG, reality meshes). All asset data provide useful lifecycle facility asset inventory information for data management, with data that are accessible, searchable, geospatial, contextual, reliable, durable, extractable, and interoperable.
Essential uses of DABs include:
- Geospatial location of assets
- 2D/3D visual model use in the field
- Verification of field quantities linked to pay quantities
- Survey/model with attributes to systems of record
- Survey/model asset extraction to/from GIS/Asset Management Systems
DABs are a key link in the handover from the design-construction Project Information Model to the asset management Asset Information Model in information management.
Evolution of DABs Practice
