Rail Baltica is a railway infrastructure megaproject that spans across several countries. The depth of skills and expertise required to successfully execute a greenfield project of this caliber is extensive and would not be possible without our diverse team of professionals.
Welcome back to our series, “Rail Baltica: The People Behind the Vision,” where we introduce you to the members of the Rail Baltica global project team. These individuals are the driving force advancing the Rail Baltica project with their professionalism, dedication, and passion for this project.
Dmitri Garbuzenko, BIM and AIM Coordinator, RB Rail AS
As Building Information Modelling (BIM) and Asset Information Management (AIM) Coordinator Dmitri oversees and co-leads the implementation process of the BIM system for the Rail Baltica Global Project, in addition to reviewing and verifying Detailed Technical Design deliverables.
How would you explain to a 5-year-old what you do in Rail Baltica?
Imagine you want to build a treehouse in the backyard. You go to your grandfather, and he tells you that before building, you need to design it! Well, that’s obvious!
Your grandfather takes paper, pencils, rulers, and you start to sketch. The first paper sketch is ready, but it’s not perfect, and you have to redraw everything. The same happened with the second sketch and the third… This takes so much time and effort!
But then your dad comes by and says, “Hey! Why don’t we build this in Minecraft!” That sounds fun, isn’t it?
So, you launch Minecraft game and build a treehouse. If something needs to be changed, you do it in seconds! The computer helps you to create the best possible design within minutes, and it feels real, meaning you can rotate the house, zoom in, zoom out. You can even make walkthroughs in it!
The modern way of engineering design is similar – before actually building a railway, we first create a smart computer version of it.
My work is to check if this computer version of railway is correct.
Basically, I play Minecraft for adults all day long! What a dream job!
How has your role evolved since you first joined the Rail Baltica project, and what have you learned along the way?
I started as a BIM expert, responsible for BIM deliverable compliance checks, but soon, thanks to the support of my team leader Jovita Starynina and head of the VDC department Raitis Busmanis, I was able to contribute to the review process with different automation solutions. Together with my team members, we were able to learn the basics of Python and create several scripts that made our day-to-day tasks more reliable. We were able to visualize ProjectWise tasks for the whole CTO division and now (!) we are trying to build the first RAG application, using GPT4 model. Truly blessed to have such great people around me!
What specific contribution or skill do you believe you bring to the Rail Baltica project team that sets you apart from others?
I am often called an “AI person” because of my interest in modern LLM technologies. I love to come up with simple automation solutions that can benefit colleagues and myself. I even created an internal RB Rail AI group where I am trying to share my enthusiasm with my colleagues!
What hobbies, interests, talents do you have?
I love reading the most. As soon as the development of AI and large language models became an obvious phenomenon, I found great interest in linguistics. Now, I’m digging through Derrida, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein’s theories in order to understand what language is and how it works. I am also a big admirer of Prof. John Caputo’s works on postmodern theology. When I am very tired, I take a science fiction book written by Frank Herbert, Liu Cixin or Neal Stephenson.
My main hobby right now is development of Discord community for Estonian engineers and architects (its called “Python and Robots”). This is an open platform to discuss new technologies, share engineering and digital problems and help each other solving different obstacles.