Digital Twins Can Support Civil Engineering Projects
The technology has uses beyond the aviation and manufacturing sectors. A new study found all three phases of civil engineering projects—planning/design, construction, and operation and maintenance—can find value in digital twins.
BY MARK CRAWFORD
Digital twin technology (DT) has been successfully deployed in fields as varied as aviation, manufacturing, and oil and gas. But civil engineering, especially for field-related applications, has not been a venue for DT, in part because it relies on a variety of external technologies and approaches that were developed for other engineering fields. The most frequent and consistent use of DT in civil engineering projects is in the operations and maintenance phase, whereas building information modeling (BIM) is pervasively utilized in the first phase of planning/design.