This article is part of a blog series on Digital Twins, exploring what Digital Twin means and what it can do for the construction industry.

Emerging technologies like 3D printing and the adoption of IoT solutions facilitate the creation of more accurate digital models.

The Market

The digital twin market consists of a digital virtual representation of an object or system that covers its lifecycle. A digital twin model has to be updated from real-time data; it makes decision-making easier through:

• simulation
• machine learning
• reasoning.

2022 to 2027 forecast predict the global digital twin market size will reach USD 96.49 billion in 2029, at a CAGR of 40.6% during the forecast period. The construction industry segment is expected to grow slower than, other industries like healthcare and pharmaceutical, but will still expand rapidly

The main goal of digital twins is to improve the understanding of how an object will function and perform in the future.

Digital twins are expected to keep transforming the construction industry and will continue to evolve and be adopted by the industry.

Digital smart asset systems will use mobile scanning robots to capture real-time data to feed digital twins and make them successful.

Urban modeling is a growth area for the digital twin technology. Smart cities are more and more popular with mayors and the population. You can now digitize an entire city to plan its future developments, including population growth and climate change modeling.

Designing and constructing smart buildings using BIM and digital twins technologies allow you to streamline and automate your processes.

To deliver profitable, usable information to all construction stages from design to facility management your models should be able to:

• track
• store
• display complex data

How will the construction industry catch up with other industries?

Digital twins are fundamental facilitators for the construction industry to respond to more and more demand for new facilities and new layouts following the COVID-19 shutdown.

A digital representation of real systems and components of a building will force the construction industry to accelerate the adoption of digital technology and allow it to catch up to others.

Construction projects are complex operations, that have to consider:

• legacy processes of all stakeholders
• skills enhancement
• planning permission ruling
• design innovations
• contractors’ constraints
• building owners specific requirements.

To bridge all these segregations only digital transformation can find its way through the fundamentals of each individual stakeholder’s domain, as well as their interdependence.

Humanising the way people interact and collaborate to create and manage data, is the key to success and can only be achieved by using technologies like digital twins and visualization

The change is necessary to meet the requirements for:

• growing demands
• increased complexity
• more sophisticated design authoring tools.

The global construction and design software market was valued at USD 9.6 billion in 2021 and is expected to reach USD 9.98 billion in 2022. The construction industry is good at managing risks, reducing waste and reworks, and driving efficiencies using BIM. Introducing digital twins in the processes will amplify these benefits in delivering your construction projects.

We know that human nature resists change and the construction industry which represents one of the largest asset classes in the world will be slow to fully embrace digitalization. With more than 4 billion buildings in the world today it is essential to construct more efficient buildings and improve the efficiency of the existing ones, increase their value and make them more sustainable, to meet the future climate change goals of net zero by 2050.

What will digital twins do for new constructions?

Digital twin's demand increased during the COVID lockdown.

CRB, a construction provider for the biotech industry used digital twins to design and build new vaccine plants. For their projects they:

• used the layout of existing plants to accelerate the design process and improve the layout of new ones.
• modeled the workflow and safety properties of the new facilities to identify and rectify any bottlenecks before the new facilities were started.
• kept data integrity through seamless collaboration, along the way of the various handover between designers, contractors, owners, and facility managers.

CRB and Matterport digtization case

Digital twins help to avoid unnecessary trips for engineers to existing or new plants. On one project, CRB used Matterport Pro2 a high-quality 3D capture with unlimited 4K print quality photography to create a digital twin. It enabled all teams to collaborate on a single cloud platform. They were able to:

• decrease the team of onsite engineers from 10 to 1
• reduce travel costs by 33%
• shorten the design process by three weeks
• collect and systematize data across different participants.

Reduce Operational expenditure

Facility management expenditure represents 80% or more of the total facility lifetime cost.

Facility owners are often experiencing data losses during the handover from the design and construction phases. Digital twin is like a pot of gold for them. Facility managers can use digital twins to:

• understand why things were engineered and designed in the manner they were
• simplify maintenance processes.

For example, If you have to repair a pump that is not functioning properly your technicians need to understand its design and what the pump was supposed to do. Utilizing digital twins can help as they are able to see how the pump fits in the whole system, not only the ruptured one.

Productivity gains

According to McKinsey, construction expenditure represents 13% of the world GDP and $1.6 trillion meet half the world’s infrastructure need of additional value-added which could be created if productivity was at a higher level.

Here are the 7 activities McKinsey recommend to boost productivity:

• reshape regulation
• rewire contracts
• rethink design
• improve onsite execution
• infuse technology and innovation
• reskill workers
• improve procurement and supply chain.

The digital twin capabilities of harmonizing data between design, manufacturing, and construction, will increase productivity gains along the life cycle of a building by:

• capturing data continuously with BIM and digital twins using sensors and monitoring devices during the design and construction phases
• updating data in real-time to get a better understanding of the performance of the construction site by: predicting trends, mitigating risks, optimizing schedules, consolidating data at handover in the digital twin to get a single source of truth, continuing to capture data in the post-construction phase over the lifetime of the building.

Our partner Procore considers that digital twins are about connecting to real-life objects or information, a key issue in an area that combines so many different engineering facets.

Digital twin implementation should be part of a technology strategy to manage different data sources, including:

• GIS for location data
• building information modeling (BIM) for 3D data
• virtual design and construction (VDC) for project management
• sensors or cameras to allow access, control, and reporting from those devices.

Our partner Plannerly's platform can help you to put in place the right standards, processes, and verifications to eliminate unnecessary data requirements.

Processing raw data requires streamlined processes and agile software engineering practices for building and deploying digital twins.

The United Kingdom started a project, building a digital twin of the transport network to improve one of the busiest shipping hubs in the wake of Brexit.

Digital twins include all the details required to:

• perform purchasing
• achieve construction assembly
• improve ergonomics.

For example, a digital twin could simulate, in nursing homes, how to take care of patients’ heavy lifting.

Transform construction life cycle management

You should rethink the entire construction and management processes to:

• improve efficiencies with standardized manufactured products properties
• include test and facility management teams early in the process
• collaborate to deliver better results.

Construction developments

Many elements should evolve for digital twins to be adopted. Modular builder Katerra’s failure was spectacular and proved how difficult it is to transform the industry. The failure was due to:

• delayed projects
• construction costs
• pandemic-related impacts
• inability to convince developers and contractors to move away from their traditional subcontractors to transform the construction industry.

The technology to collect, integrate and manage data to create a digital twin exists. But it is very complex to work through the patchwork of technologies, software and vendors. It will require governments, and all construction stakeholders to work together to accelerate its adoption. The industry will have to:

• define digital twins. Right now, any virtual object associated with data is being called a digital twin
• harmonize the various formats
• fully implement ISO 19650
• have a single common data interchange environment.

“Even with all the great APIs, cloud-based data, and platform solutions, there still remains a massive amount of data stuck in silos that are not able to be fully accessed,” Procore said.

A new mindset

The Digital Twin Consortium says that “attention focuses on the bright shiny side of digital twins, pragmatic considerations are coming into greater play, and guides from other industries are being studied”

To have efficient digital twins, the industry will have to change its mindset:

• most legacy construction methods and processes should be replaced
• project thinking has to be replaced with product thinking
• construction should be replaced with assembly.

The future of retrofitting

Digital twins can be used for structures of all shapes and sizes, from buildings and bridges to motorways, entire cities, and even for existing structures.

On existing assets, you can build a digital twin retrospectively by:

• calibrating a new model
• interrogating real-time data from the construction
• using smart technology, such as sensors to monitor the building performances
• determining the appropriate inputs for a simulation model
• comparing the simulation results with measured sensor and meter data.

This calibrated model then becomes a digital twin.

In Conclusion

The digital twins’ use is increasing.

The innovative technology is being used across industries to:

• streamline processes
• improve decision-making
• reduce risk
• promote sustainability for both new builds and existing structures
• identify inefficiencies
• track material for long term sustainability
• monitor building performances for preventative maintenance.

To find your way through the maze of technologies take the Driving Vision technology diagnostic.

In this diagnostic, we look at the best way to insert new technology into your workflows and how to move your organization to cloud computing so you can open up new possibilities for your daily planning tasks and make sure your data never leaves the optimally secured data center.

The technology appraisal report will help you to explore what investment is required to improve your projects’ productivity and collaboration as well as the ROI you can expect on your investment.

A Driving Vision expert will conduct the interviews online and will issue a report and discuss with you our findings. Together we will decide the best way to implement the solutions at your pace and according to your budget.

Implementing BIM can be daunting, but Driving Vision is here to help you at the pace you are comfortable with. Get started by getting in touch now