UTILIZED SOFTWARE 

Bentley View, MicroStation, OpenBuildings, OpenFlows, OpenRoads, PLAXIS, GenerativeComponents

LOCATION 

Portugal

ORGANIZATION/COMPANY 

COBA - Consultores de Engenharia e Ambiente

Beneath the historic streets of Lisbon, a EUR 380 million extension of the metro's Yellow and Green Lines shows what sustainable infrastructure looks like when digital engineering leads the way. COBA – Consultores de Engenharia e Ambiente faced an unforgiving brief: build a new underground station and a 665-meter tunnel through a dense urban fabric, with excavations reaching 38 meters, sharp elevation changes, extreme geological heterogeneity, high groundwater, live utility corridors, and classified heritage buildings on every side — all while tram and railway services kept running.

The team answered with an integrated digital workflow. Data-rich 3D models built in MicroStation, OpenBuildings, and OpenRoads unified the design, while PLAXIS 2D and 3D handled complex soil-structure interaction, geotechnical, and hydrogeological analysis. Visual programming through GenerativeComponents mapped settlement risk so monitoring could be targeted where it mattered, backed by 953 tracking devices. More than 300 construction stages were analyzed across two main models, and the digital twin was updated continuously so crews could adapt excavation geometries and support systems the moment unexpected groundwater or geological anomalies appeared.

The gains were both operational and environmental. The team cut work hours by 10 percent while improving deliverable quality and risk management, avoided structural over-design, optimized material consumption, and secured a 100-year design life — producing over 1,400 drawings and a terabyte of project data along the way. Hydrogeological modeling protected local aquifers and groundwater flow, preserving ecological function in a fragile urban setting.

The lasting impact runs wider still. By expanding electric rail capacity in a congested historic core, the project shifts journeys from fossil-fueled vehicles to low-carbon public transit, lowering regional emissions and improving air quality — evidence that better modeling upstream produces measurably lighter footprints for a century to come.