Abstract Manager

The Highway 401 Expansion project was a design-build project to widen a 18km long segment of the 401 from the Credit River in Mississauga to Regional Road 25 in Milton. The highway mainline was widened from 3 lanes to 5 lanes or from 3 lanes to 6 lanes in the express/collector sections.  The project, with a total budget of $640M, was designed and built under a very aggressive schedule.

Highway 401 in the Greater Toronto Area is the busiest highway in North America. The segment that was widened carries approximately 180,000 vehicles on average per day. Given the importance of the highway and the aggressive schedule to complete the work, the team utilized as many technological innovations as possible to make the work more efficient. One of these innovations was to build a complete digital twin of the project to be used in all aspects of the work from the design, scheduling, construction, quality, and final commissioning and close out. The Parsons platform of Paradim® was utilized to develop the digital twin, which was a digital representation of physical and functional characteristics of the asset used as a “single-pane-of-glass” solution. It’s one place where the entire project team can easily and efficiently access the critical data needed to collaborate and ensure the project’s success.

While the digital twin was used by the environmental, safety, quality, construction, commissioning teams, this presentation will focus on the commissioning process to close out the project, which achieved substantial completion in October 2023.

As part of the project requirements, a process was to be developed for the commissioning of the highway, which primarily required every element of the highway to be walked down by the Contracting Authority. A commissioning application was built into the Paradim® platform which has every element of the highway broken down by Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). A mobile application allowed for deficiencies to be entered for the walkdown of each section of completed highway, recording the deficiencies with a description, photograph and GPS location, which will be stored in Paradim®. The dashboard allows the commissioning, quality and construction teams to view the deficiencies over the digital twin, to group and assign them to the various teams for rectification, and submission to the contracting authority for verification and acceptance. This tool was very useful in the commissioning process to identify, categorize and closeout deficiencies for substantial completion and ultimately final completion.