Applications of Digital Twins for the Construction Process

With a focus on the automation of construction, this paper presents a literature review and overview of how digital twins can be used in construction and their potential applications. A digital twin is a digital, intelligent counterpart of a real-life object, human, process, or building, which is uniquely linked to its physical twin, establishing a one-to-one correspondence between them. Construction projects involve a huge amount of information creation and sharing among the project team. Hence, a large amount of data is generated in each project which needs to be created, analyzed, and made accessible to everyone working on the same building. A digital twin offers additional value over the use of building information models (BIM) to manage the construction process because of its potential to update using real-time progress and simulate forecasted conditions. Unlike digital twins in manufacturing, digital twins for construction are still poorly understood. The temporary nature of construction and the dynamic nature of the sites make monitoring of construction processes and resources difficult. To address this issue, this paper explores the use of digital twins in construction processes. It discusses the use cases of digital twins and their potential application in construction contexts. It is observed that sequencing tasks/processes, navigation, forecasting, and setting up data-enriched 3D models to simulate construction processes can all be potentially mirrored using digital twins with more innovations in existing technology in construction.