Bridge Applications in Literature Mentioning BIM and XR: A Systematic Review with Perspectives for Railway Maintenance

This systematic review characterizes bridge applications retrieved through a Scopus search requiring both Building Information Modeling (BIM/BrIM) and Extended Reality (XR) terminology, with perspectives for railway maintenance. This intersection selects publications mentioning both concepts and does not comprehensively cover bridge BIM research, XR research or Digital Twins (DTs). The historical search identified 196 records. A complementary DT/BIM/XR search returned 11 records, including ten duplicates. After cross-search deduplication, 197 reports were sought, 42 remained unavailable, 155 were assessed and 83 were excluded, yielding 72 included reports. This updated selection incorporates one recovered report, one corrected language exclusion and one new eligible report. Within this corpus, 34 reports (47%) are coded as BIM without point-cloud or finite element modeling components, and 22 (31%) combine BIM with point clouds. These representation categories are independent of XR implementation. Ten reports include finite element modeling. Seventeen reports are coded with XR, comprising seven AR, six MR and four VR applications. Mentioning XR for retrieval does not establish its implementation. These conditional frequencies cannot estimate technology prevalence in the broader field. Access restrictions and outstanding source-level recoding further limit generalization. The review distinguishes information models from data-connected representations and separates visualization from diagnostic or predictive functions. XR offers task-dependent opportunities for inspection and communication, while its additional value requires comparative validation. Future work should evaluate interoperable condition assessment and maintenance decision support, with XR assessed where a specific operational benefit can be demonstrated.