I’m so happy that our article on how to #design and implement better digital twins is now available in one of the most #prestigious journals in #informationtechnology in the construction/civil #engineering.
I am not going to lie, this was a #challenging #research domain for me 🙂 I have learnt a lot about challenges around #multidisciplinary research through this project. There is an obvious divide between my world and the #constructionengineering #civilengineering #structuralengineering and related domains.
We tried to highlight this divide and show how future projects can be done better. We have used a #smart #infrastructure #digitaltwin case study for this. I do not know if/when the current practices will evolve to the level we envisioned but isn’t it the #scientist role to push towards that level?
I want to thank Jennifer Schooling for the support, encouragement, and all the great discussions once more again. Without her, I wouldn’t be able to push myself this much and probably wouldn’t even publish this work. And thanks to Miguel Bravo-Haro for being part of this and contributing to the ideas.
This is also the last planned output of my work at the University of Cambridge, Cambridge Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Constructionand Centre for Digital Built Britain. I feels like a goodbye but we all know that this is just the beginning 🙂
Here is what to expect from the article:
There is a critical need to make infrastructure systems more efficient, resilient, and #sustainable. Infrastructure systems provide the basis for everyday life and enable the flow of goods, #information, and #services within urban and regional settings. Providing data-centric solutions to improve this flow is essential. This can only be achieved if we manage to transform passive infrastructure assets into #cyberphysicalsystems. #Digital twins bring the opportunity to turn passive infrastructure assets into #datacentric #systemofsystems.
This article aims to provide a summary of existing digital twin architectures and exemplify a digital twin design and implementation. To this end, a literature review of digital twin architecture is presented in addition to a case study of a digital twin implementation in smart infrastructure. The case study focuses on a digital twin implementation of a bridge and describes in detail the physical, cyber, #integration, and service layers of this implementation. Later in the article, we discuss the learnings from this case study under three main categories – #systems perspective, #information perspective, and #organisational perspective. The findings show the importance of acquiring a systems perspective when designing digital twins today to enable interoperable systems of systems in the future. Furthermore, the findings highlight the vital necessity of #data and information management while also considering the multidisciplinary aspects of digital twin design and implementation.
Didem Gürdür Broo 