Towards digital twins for heritage buildings: A workflow proposal

Abstract

There has been a recent interest in the field of digital heritage to advance historic building information modeling (HBIM) towards digital twins (DT). This paper investigates the potential and limitations of HBIM use as DTs through a systematic mapping of literature (SML). The conclusions were applied in an incremental and low-code workflow to model historic buildings aiming at achieving a trade-off between a high degree of parametrization and a high degree of geometric accuracy. The proposed workflow is illustrated through a parametric script developed with visual programming in Grasshopper for Rhino 3D to model historic columns from profiles. VisualARQ for Rhino 3D is used to convert the script into a BIM object that uses profiles, automatically extracted from a point cloud acquired with 3D laser scanning, as an initial shape. This results in a simpler workflow to achieve more accurate HBIM models that could be leveraged in DT simulations.