Digital twinning presents a golden opportunity for the road construction and management industry to boost its efficiency, and deliver better services for the public by embracing digital transformation.
This was the message to delegates from two engineers and academics at the 40th Southern African Transport Conference 2022, being held at the CSIR ICC in Pretoria.
“Digital twins have a high potential to support road infrastructure asset management processes,” said Jan Andries Wium and Richard Matchett of the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Stellenbosch, presenting insights from a recent paper on the second day of the conference.
Digital twinning began life in manufacturing, as a means of creating a virtual model of a physical product and then digitally predicting the effect of proposed changes.
The method has been widely adopted, and holds great potential in the infrastructure space, as a way of understanding the impacts of construction and maintenance plans before they are implemented in the real world.
Digital twinning is now helping to drive the transformation of the construction sector, generating and analysing data about assets in order to refine those assets before and after deployment.
Digital twinning pairs a physical and a virtual asset. The digital twin is a representation of the physical twin. For example, a digital twin of a building might be represented by a 3D model of the building that displays the building structure, climate control systems and components, such that the operational characteristics of the physical building (e.g., measured ambient temperature and room occupancy) can be visualised.
Digital twinning is already established in the industrial, medical and building industries, but Wium and Matchett believe that road construction and management are also well suited to digital twinning.
The two say that by cooperating on the use of digital versions of road designs, the various participants in the road asset lifecycle would be able to produce and manage vast amounts of data, which in turn could enable better, more integrated decision-making.
“The combination of integrated data, closed-loop information flow, graphic representation of asset information and structured decision support make digital twinning ideally suited to a Road Asset Management System (RAMS),” said Wium.
However, Matchett said they believe that in order for digital twinning to be adopted within the roads sector, a building information modelling (BIM) standard for roads needs to be established, together with an agreed and accepted road asset information standard (RAIS).
Standardising the creation and use of road digital twins would help to ensure positive outcomes and justify the investment required to digitally transform the construction sector and its participants.
“To deploy digital twins effectively for the roads sector in South Africa, road authorities must understand clearly what the industry’s information requirements are,” said Wium. “That way, they can ensure the consistent quality of the design and as-built documentation.”
The Matchett and Wium paper, titled “Digital Twins For Road Infrastructure” proposes a conceptual framework for road-infrastructure digital twins, including construction, reality capture, measurement and sensing, data storage and analysis, as a practical, improved method for road authorities to manage their assets.
One of the most powerful applications of digital twins for road asset management is that they can enable users to see digital versions of new and existing road assets throughout the asset’s life cycle. In this way, the digital twins can support decision-making by the operator or owner through constantly updated data.
“These and other benefits of digital twins present a significant opportunity for road authorities to modernise their operations and leverage data-driven information to increase service delivery to the public,” said Wium.
“Road assets must digitally transform their internal management, reporting and operational processes to achieve all the benefits of digital twinning,” said Matchett. “Change management, training and system implementation must be driven from the executive level and implemented consistently throughout the organisation to ensure that the benefits of implementing digital twinning are achieved.”
“The digital transformation of the construction sector is overdue,” concluded Wium. “The implementation of digital twins for roads would represent a significant step towards a more digitally transformed construction sector.”
