Visualization of trouble spots for decontamination work and decision measurements with the help of BIM

Abstract The clearance of buildings is a central step in the decommissioning process of nuclear facilities. Typical nuclear power plants in Germany have 100,000 m 2 to 450,000 m 2 of concrete surfaces that need to be processed for clearance. For efficient planning of decommissioning tasks, precise and up to date information about the premises to be released is essential. Due to the early construction period of the nuclear power plants no digital 3D models from design phase exist. Therefore, accurate recording of the spatial data, in particular all building surfaces as well as the interfering objects contained therein is necessary for the planning and execution of the decision measurements. At the beginning of this project, spatial data acquisition was largely done manually. These methods were tedious and error prone. To counteract these problems, the research project ViSDeMe – Visualization of Trouble Spots for Decontamination Work and Decision Measurements with the Help of BIM – has been applied for. The aim of the research project was the digitalization and (at least partial) automation of relevant process steps of spatial data acquisition and the associated documentation for the building release of a nuclear facility. In this project both the 3D BIM model and the associated (semi-) automated processes such as the object detection were developed successfully. The digitalization process is being investigated and evaluated in cooperation with the project partner RWE Nuclear GmbH (RWE) using the example of the power plant in Mülheim-Kärlich, Germany. The results of the project are presented in this paper.