Case Study: Brenner Base Tunnel achieves accelerated, cost-efficient construction planning with Trimble TILOS

Brenner Base Tunnel - Customer Case Study

Trimble supplied its TILOS planning software to the Brenner Base Tunnel project, a 55 km, €10+ billion Austria–Italy rail tunnel that needed to cut travel times and shift freight from road to rail. The project’s scale and complexity — millions of cubic meters of spoil, multiple contract sections, time‑dependent machine costs, changing permits and geological uncertainty — made the original CAD-based Time Location Diagrams too slow and error-prone, since they could not be easily linked or updated according to precedence relationships.

Using TILOS, planners imported profile and homogenous‑area data via Excel, linked tasks with PDM logic, and applied the “third dimension” of distance to produce dynamic time‑location diagrams, histograms and cost/volume forecasts. The result was faster, more accurate scenario planning and bidding, real‑time progress and cost monitoring (including spoil‑site capacity and time‑dependent machinery costs), and optimized schedules — enabling tunneling to begin and accelerating progress on the main contract sections.

Brenner Base Tunnel

Stephan Rieder

Brenner Base Tunnel