Digital Twin: Vision, Benefits, Boundaries, and Creation for Buildings

Abstract

The concept of a digital twin has been used in some industries where an accurate digital model of the equipment can be used for predictive maintenance. The use of a digital twin for performance is critical, and for capital-intensive equipment such as jet engines it proved to be successful in terms of cost savings and reliability improvements. In this paper, we aim to study the expansion of the digital twin in including building life cycle management and explore the benefits and shortcomings of such implementation. In four rounds of experimentation, more than 25,000 sensor reading instances were collected, analyzed, and utilized to create and test a limited digital twin of an office building facade element. This is performed to point out the method of implementation, highlight the benefits gained from digital twin, and to uncover some of the technical shortcomings of the current Internet of Things systems for this purpose. INDEX TERMS Building information modeling, digital twin, life cycle management, Internet of Things, wireless sensor network.

Geospatial Artificial Intelligence: Potentials of Machine Learning for 3D Point Clouds and Geospatial Digital Twins

“…While the connection between both can be handled by sensors, the virtual models have to be derived from the physical counterparts. For example, 3D point clouds are used to derive 3D indoor models, which are essential components for real-time building information models together with sensor networks and IoT devices (Khajavi et al 2019); they also "represent a generic approach to capture, model, analyse, and visualize digital twins used by operators in Industry 4.0 application scenarios" (Posada et al 2018). In that regard, geospatial digital twins are means for monitoring, visualizing, exploring, optimizing, and predicting behaviour and processes related to the corresponding physical entities.…”

Construction with digital twin information systems

“…For the purpose of their operation and maintenance, based largely on the BIM models produced through their design and construction (Aengenvoort and Krämer, 2018;Borrmann et al, 2018;Arup, 2019). For example, in addition to listing five differentiators between BIM models and digital twins, Khajavi et al (2019) observed that the use of digital twins of buildings is restricted to building operation. In this work, we adopt the Centre for Digital Built Britain's definition of digital twins in infrastructure: a digital twin is "a realistic digital representation of assets, processes or systems in the built or natural environment" (Bolton et al, 2018, p. 10).…”

Towards Integrated Digital Twins for Industrial Products: Case Study on an Overhead Crane

“…These concentrate on various areas of mechanical engineering, which is a trend continued by the majority of digital twin applications as shown by multiple review articles [7][8][9][10][11][12]. More recently, other domains, such as healthcare [13], business [14], and buildings [15], are starting to adopt digital twins as well. For a more in-depth exploration of the background of the digital twin concept, we refer to Section II in Autiosalo et al [16].…”