Towards 3D Geoinformatics and Computational Civil Engineering Support for Cooperative Tracks Planning

SUMMARY The planning of road, railway, and subway tracks in urban environments is a manifold task because of complex legal, environmental, economic, and structural problems. However, skills and knowledge of the participants differ substantially and computer support for complex planning still is at its beginning. Especially computer-aided collaborative planning for 3D city and building models is a new challenge with many open research questions. Mainly two communities can interdisciplinary contribute to a solution: Geoinformatics and Computational Civil Engineering. Both fields have a tradition in 2D planning and both are developing towards a " 3D science ". For example, 3D models in different scales should be included into the planning process right from the beginning to complement 2D plans. Furthermore, 3D geo-databases should provide on-demand internet-based access to tracks and other infrastructure models. Therefore 3D geo web services should simplify the access to objects above and under the earth surface. Data management tools should interact with efficient 3D computer vision techniques. In this contribution research approaches of the researchers group " Computer-aided collaborative tracks planning in multi-scale 3D city and building models " are presented. The way to facilitate planning processes for subway track planning is described by developing a collaborative platform communicating with components to be developed for the modelling, management, and visualisation of 3D multi-scale models. Basic research combining ideas from the fields of collaborative planning platforms, 3D modelling, spatio-temporal databases, geo web services, and computer vision is presented.