Digital twins in construction practice - A use case driven implementation based on existing theory

Abstract

Digital Twins are a key concept for the industry 4.0 and they are also becoming increasingly important in the construction industry. For the application in construction practice, the paper gives a short introduction of the Digital Twin theory, describes the different elements of a Digital Twin, and discusses the different tasks, which have to be addressed within the life cycle. Based on this, an approach to structure, harmonize, and integrate heterogeneous data is presented. The key element is the definition and exhaustive implementation of a project data structure which is applied to all elements within a 3D-model an all other data sources. This approach allows to “glue” data from multiple sources and to access filtered results. Finally, the paper presents the realization of a Digital Twin. For this purpose a German highway project operated in a public private partnership with a length of 47 km is introduced. The Digital Twin integrates data from different sources like roadway inspections, mobile status monitoring, traffic data, weather data, and 3D model data. All of them are processed for the application in different use cases. A dashboard generated with a Business Intelligence solution provides visually prepared information for the decision making process.