As the Architecture, Engineering and Construction sector is embracing the digital age, the processes involved in the design, construction and operation of built assets are more and more influenced by ...technologies dealing with value-added monitoring of data from sensor networks, management of this data in secure and resilient storage systems underpinned by semantic models, as well as the simulation and optimisation of engineering systems. Aside from enhancing the efficiency of the value chain, such information-intensive models and associated technologies play a decisive role in minimising the lifecycle impacts of our buildings. While Building Information Modelling provides procedures, technologies and data schemas enabling a standardised semantic representation of building components and systems, the concept of a Digital Twin conveys a more holistic socio-technical and process-oriented characterisation of the complex artefacts involved by leveraging the synchronicity of the cyber-physical bi-directional data flows. Moreover, BIM lacks semantic completeness in areas such as control systems, including sensor networks, social systems, and urban artefacts beyond the scope of buildings, thus requiring a holistic, scalable semantic approach that factors in dynamic data at different levels. The paper reviews the multi-faceted applications of BIM during the construction stage and highlights limits and requirements, paving the way to the concept of a Construction Digital Twin. A definition of such a concept is then given, described in terms of underpinning research themes, while elaborating on areas for future research.
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•The construction sector can greatly benefit from adopting a Digital Twin paradigm.•196 academic publications were reviewed on the status of BIM and Digital Twin.•The nD BIM uses during construction are analysed, along with the latest technologies.•The Digital Twin uses are discussed from several nearby engineering fields.•A conceptual framework for a Construction Digital Twin is proposed.
Digital twins (DTs) play a vital role in revolutionising the healthcare industry, leading to more personalised, intelligent, and proactive healthcare. With the evolution of personalised healthcare, ...there is a significant need to represent a virtual replica for individuals to provide the right type of care in the right way and at the right time. Therefore, in this paper, we surveyed the concept of a personal digital twin (PDT) as an enhanced version of the DT with actionable insight capabilities. In particular, PDT can bring value to patients by enabling more accurate decision making and proper treatment selection and optimisation. Then, we explored the progression of PDT as a revolutionary technology in healthcare research and industry. However, although several research works have been performed for smart healthcare using DT, PDT is still at an early stage. Consequently, we believe that this work can be a step towards smart personalised healthcare industry by guiding the design of industrial personalised healthcare systems. Accordingly, we introduced a reference framework that empowers smart personalised healthcare using PDTs by bringing together existing advanced technologies (i.e., DT, blockchain, and AI). Then, we described some selected use cases, including the mitigation of COVID-19 contagion, COVID-19 survivor follow-up care, personalised COVID-19 medicine, personalised osteoporosis prevention, personalised cancer survivor follow-up care, and personalised nutrition. Finally, we identified further challenges to pave the PDT paradigm toward the smart personalised healthcare industry.
Digital twin can be defined as a virtual representation of a physical asset enabled through data and simulators for real-time prediction, optimization, monitoring, controlling, and improved decision ...making. Recent advances in computational pipelines, multiphysics solvers, artificial intelligence, big data cybernetics, data processing and management tools bring the promise of digital twins and their impact on society closer to reality. Digital twinning is now an important and emerging trend in many applications. Also referred to as a computational megamodel, device shadow, mirrored system, avatar or a synchronized virtual prototype, there can be no doubt that a digital twin plays a transformative role not only in how we design and operate cyber-physical intelligent systems, but also in how we advance the modularity of multi-disciplinary systems to tackle fundamental barriers not addressed by the current, evolutionary modeling practices. In this work, we review the recent status of methodologies and techniques related to the construction of digital twins mostly from a modeling perspective. Our aim is to provide a detailed coverage of the current challenges and enabling technologies along with recommendations and reflections for various stakeholders.
•Variant oriented human-robot collaborative systems are characterized as complex systems.•Digital-twins are valid to address complexity of a human-robot production system.•Digital twins can address ...the challenges from design to operation.•3D simulation models of a physical system can be linked to the corresponding physical assets.•The dimensions of data collection and their integration with the digital twin need to be researched further.
Human-robot collaboration (HRC) can expand the level of automation in areas that have conventionally been difficult to automate such as assembly. However, the need of adaptability and the dynamics of human presence are keeping the full potential of human-robot collaborative systems difficult to achieve. This paper explores the opportunities of using a digital twin to address the complexity of collaborative production systems through an industrial case and a demonstrator. A digital twin, as a virtual counterpart of a physical human-robot assembly system, is built as a ‘front-runner’ for validation and control throughout its design, build and operation. The forms of digital twins along system's life cycle, its building blocks and the potential advantages are presented and discussed. Recommendations for future research and practice in the use of digital twins in the field of cobotics are given.
Power system digital twins (PSDTs) are foreseen as an essential step toward future grids that will positively affect network monitoring, operation, and planning across the whole power industry. ...Existing frameworks for developing a DT are bounded to particular power system components, applications and/or users. This article proposes a modular framework for the implementation of PSDTs that is flexible, robust, and cost-effective. The modularity in design enables the expansion of the twin beyond power system components and facilitates the integration of multiple services and users, without affecting the functionality of existing modules. Each module can be independently built, modified, replaced, or exchanged with other modules, unlocking multiple, more advanced, dedicated, and multidomain applications for the operation and planning of power systems. The first step toward a PSDT is illustrated based on a real-time compatible model of the Australian National Electricity Market. The model can be seen as the core of one or more distinct modules in the DT, which can be adapted and scaled for particular applications. The EMT real-time compatible model is employed to demonstrate four potential services, including renewable energy integration and "what-if" scenario cases, which are expected applications in forward-looking PSDTs.
Improving railway safety depends heavily on the reliability of railway turnouts. The realization of effective, reliable and continuous observations for the spatial analysis and evaluation of the ...technical condition of railway turnouts is one of the factors affecting safety in railway traffic. The mode and scope of monitoring changes in geometric parameters of railway turnouts with associated indicators needs improvement. The application of digital twins to railway turnouts requires the inclusion of fundamental data indicating their condition along with innovative monitoring of weather conditions. This paper presents an innovative solution for monitoring the status of temperature and other atmospheric conditions. A UbiBot WS1 WIFI wireless temperature logger was used, with an external DS18B20 temperature sensor integrated into an S49 (49E1)-type rail as Tszyn WS1 WIFI. Measurements were made between January and May (winter/spring) at fixed time intervals and at the same measurement point. The aim of the research is to present elements of a fundamental approach of applying digital twins to railway turnouts requiring the consideration and demonstration of rail temperature conditions as a component in the data acquisition of railway turnout condition data and other constituent atmospheric conditions through an innovative solution. The research showed that the presented innovative solution is an effective support for the application of digital twins to railway turnouts and ongoing surveying and diagnostic work of other elements of rail transport infrastructure. The applicability of the TgCWRII second temperature difference indicator in the monitoring of railway turnouts was also confirmed.
Emerging technologies, such as digital twins and 6th generation (6G) mobile networks, have accelerated the realization of edge intelligence in industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). The integration of ...digital twin and 6G bridges the physical system with digital space and enables robust instant wireless connectivity. With increasing concerns on data privacy, federated learning has been regarded as a promising solution for deploying distributed data processing and learning in wireless networks. However, unreliable communication channels, limited resources, and lack of trust among users hinder the effective application of federated learning in IIoT. In this article, we introduce the digital twin wireless networks (DTWN) by incorporating digital twins into wireless networks, to migrate real-time data processing and computation to the edge plane. Then, we propose a blockchain empowered federated learning framework running in the DTWN for collaborative computing, which improves the reliability and security of the system and enhances data privacy. Moreover, to balance the learning accuracy and time cost of the proposed scheme, we formulate an optimization problem for edge association by jointly considering digital twin association, training data batch size, and bandwidth allocation. We exploit multiagent reinforcement learning to find an optimal solution to the problem. Numerical results on real-world dataset show that the proposed scheme yields improved efficiency and reduced cost compared to benchmark learning methods.
This paper presents an innovative investigation on prototyping a digital twin (DT) as the platform for human-robot interactive welding and welder behavior analysis. This human-robot interaction (HRI) ...working style helps to enhance human users' operational productivity and comfort; while data-driven welder behavior analysis benefits to further novice welder training. This HRI system includes three modules: 1) a human user who demonstrates the welding operations offsite with her/his operations recorded by the motion-tracked handles; 2) a robot that executes the demonstrated welding operations to complete the physical welding tasks onsite; 3) a DT system that is developed based on virtual reality (VR) as a digital replica of the physical human-robot interactive welding environment. The DT system bridges a human user and robot through a bi-directional information flow: a) transmitting demonstrated welding operations in VR to the robot in the physical environment; b) displaying the physical welding scenes to human users in VR. Compared to existing DT systems reported in the literatures, the developed one provides better capability in engaging human users in interacting with welding scenes, through an augmented VR. To verify the effectiveness, six welders, skilled with certain manual welding training and unskilled without any training, tested the system by completing the same welding job; three skilled welders produce satisfied welded workpieces, while the other three unskilled do not. A data-driven approach as a combination of fast Fourier transform (FFT), principal component analysis (PCA), and support vector machine (SVM) is developed to analyze their behaviors. Given an operation sequence, i.e., motion speed sequence of the welding torch, frequency features are firstly extracted by FFT and then reduced in dimension through PCA, which are finally routed into SVM for classification. The trained model demonstrates a 94.44% classification accuracy in the testing dataset. The successful pattern recognition in skilled welder operations should benefit to accelerate novice welder training.
•A novel digital twin-driven approach for rapid reconfiguration of automated manufacturing systems is proposed.•Open-architecture machine tools (OAMTs) that can be rapidly reconfigured are defined ...and developed.•A REST-based IIoT model is proposed for the rapid reconfiguration of controls and sensor network.•A bi-level programming model of upper-level productivity rebalancing and lower-level reconfiguration cost is presented to find an optimal reconfiguration solution.
Increasing individualization demands in products call for high flexibility in the manufacturing systems to adapt changes. This paper proposes a novel digital twin-driven approach for rapid reconfiguration of automated manufacturing systems. The digital twin comprises two parts, the semi-physical simulation that maps data of the system and provides input data to the second part, which is optimization. The results of the optimization part are fed back to the semi-physical simulation for verification. Open-architecture machine tool (OAMT) is defined and developed as a new class of machine tools comprising a fixed standard platform and various individualized modules that can be added and rapidly swapped. Engineers can flexibly reconfigure the manufacturing system for catering to process planning by integrating personalized modules into its OAMTs. Key enabling techniques, including how to twin cyber and physical system and how to quickly bi-level program the production capacity and functionality of manufacturing systems to adapt rapid changes of products, are detailed. A physical implementation is conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach to achieving improved system performance while minimizing the overheads of the reconfiguration process by automating and rapidly optimizing it.
Digital Twin (DT) is an emerging technology surrounded by many promises, and potentials to reshape the future of industries and society overall. A DT is a system-of-systems which goes far beyond the ...traditional computer-based simulations and analysis. It is a replication of all the elements, processes, dynamics, and firmware of a physical system into a digital counterpart. The two systems (physical and digital) exist side by side, sharing all the inputs and operations using real-time data communications and information transfer. With the incorporation of Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), 3D models, next generation mobile communications (5G/6G), Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), distributed computing, Transfer Learning (TL), and electronic sensors, the digital/virtual counterpart of the real-world system is able to provide seamless monitoring, analysis, evaluation and predictions. The DT offers a platform for the testing and analysing of complex systems, which would be impossible in traditional simulations and modular evaluations. However, the development of this technology faces many challenges including the complexities in effective communication and data accumulation, data unavailability to train Machine Learning (ML) models, lack of processing power to support high fidelity twins, the high need for interdisciplinary collaboration, and the absence of standardized development methodologies and validation measures. Being in the early stages of development, DTs lack sufficient documentation. In this context, this survey paper aims to cover the important aspects in realization of the technology. The key enabling technologies, challenges and prospects of DTs are highlighted. The paper provides a deep insight into the technology, lists design goals and objectives, highlights design challenges and limitations across industries, discusses research and commercial developments, provides its applications and use cases, offers case studies in industry, infrastructure and healthcare, lists main service providers and stakeholders, and covers developments to date, as well as viable research dimensions for future developments in DTs.
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