Towards computer-aided collaborative subway track planning in multi-Scale 3D city and building models

The planning of road, railway and subway tracks and similar infrastructure in the urban environment - along with the associated over- or underpass structures - is a manifold task. There are complex legal, environmental, economic and structural conditions to be considered. Furthermore, the number of participants, some with widely differing skills, knowledge and interests is immense. Therefore computer-aided collaborative planning for 3D city and building models is a challenge for the 3D geoinfo community. Even though in practice 2D plans are still the predominent instrument, time seems to be ripe to introduce 3D objects into the planning process right from the beginning. This paper describes the way to facilitate planning processes for subway track planning by developing a collaborative platform supporting the modeling, management, and visualization of 3D multi-scale models. An approach to combine research from the fields of collaborative planning platforms, 3D modeling, spatio-temporal databases, geo web services, and computer vision is presented.