____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Digital Twins
engineering projects, such early notice can be worth millions.
As the operation of the building( and its digital twin) matures, eliminating the cost and management of doing routine visits for perfectly functioning equipment often surprises most organisations. Increased accuracy of the sensors that feed the virtual model, combined with intelligent planning software, mean that visits can be aligned with preventing damage to assets or components, rather than replacing them, when broken.
The net result is that the maintenance programme makes fewer visits, but those that are made are far more impactful in terms of cost savings to the business and improvements to environmental sustainability.
The ultimate goal of digital twins
The objective of a digital twin is to enable the exploration and automation of the full lifecycle of the building and its environmental and operational considerations – without having to learn via trial and error in the real world.
As data is fed from design, operations, maintenance and other stakeholders, the digital twin becomes the reference for any proposed changes. From a management perspective, this is invaluable as it both assists the integration around‘ digital hand-offs’ between parties( i. e. whose technology covers what) and provides clear transparency on segregation of duties( who is responsible for what).
The goal is the development of truly smart buildings: capable of not only monitoring themselves but also understanding maintenance cycles and the parameters for initiating actions.
These benefits are critically dependent on- and subject to- accurate, current data on all components. The axiom of‘ rubbish in, rubbish out’ is particularly applicable to digital twins.
The data for digital twins
For large scale construction and civil engineering projects getting good input data requires significant investment and effort. The optimal use of digital twins often requires an extensive array of IoT technologies and sensors across the construction to monitor conditions, tolerances, and changes.
Because any given construction or civil engineering project involves so many stakeholders, using disparate software, formats, and platforms, one of the main challenges is to overcome the inevitable data silos, where valuable information remains isolated and inaccessible to other parties. As a result, interoperability is now a major focus for digital twins in construction. Implementing compatible data formats and standardised protocols is often a critical concern.
However, given the massive potential savings to be gleaned from successful digital twin projects, these barriers are quickly being tackled. Those who successfully navigate this perfect storm will emerge as leaders in a market set to be worth $ 184.5 billion by the end of the decade. ■
For a list of the sources used in this article, please contact the editor.
Jaco Vermuelen www. bml. global
Jaco Vermuelen is CTO at BML Global. As a digital transformation partner for a wide array of projects, spanning construction and civil engineering in education, healthcare and utilities verticals, BML Global has helped organisations realise these benefits in record time.
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