Review of digital twins for constructed facilities
To prepare the article, the authors identified and analyzed 53 academic journal and conference papers, categorizing digital twins into nine areas: lifecycle analysis, facility management, energy, education, disaster, structural health monitoring, cities, infrastructure management, and miscellaneous.
Observed benefits included:
- the ability to increase engagement and collaboration
- reduce construction and operating costs
- reduce human error
- automate energy demand
- manage assets throughout their lifecycle
- apply structural health monitoring
- enable the collection of real-time data on an asset’s status, history, maintenance needs
- providing an interactive platform for managing an asset
Future directions observed included:
- addressing how to standardize data acquisition
- the semantic interoperability and heterogeneity of data
- modeling human cognitive processes
- spatio-temporal information, beneficial for smart cities and other infrastructure systems, especially in disaster situations
Why it’s relevant to Nextspace
This paper is worth Nextspace Partner reading time for three reasons:
- An excellent, unusually thorough coverage of digital twin literature .
- A deep glossary of additional reading.
- A key conclusion of the paper—that data interoperability and heterogeneity are key issues that stand in the way of full digital twin automation.
This third point is where Nextspace’s core competitive advantage comes into play.
A core excerpt from the article is important as it highlights issues that Nextspace overcomes – interoperability, the ability to not need data standards (language or schema).
... semantic interoperability between different data is one challenge. Spatial information on all aspects should also be identified. The heterogeneity of the available data could cause issues that need to be addressed before embarking on an entire city DT.
“Different nomenclature among different tools/technologies would also cause a major issue. Data acquisition could be a challenge since the modes of acquisition as well as data types need to be standardized. Hence, a formal process needs to be defined for CAD-DT creation to simplify it and streamline the process. A common standardized language is suggested for DTs to enable the creation of a standard that can be used by all projects. This will eliminate the issue of heterogeneity of data and the underlying interoperability issues that might ensue.”
