Digital Twins and Civil Engineering Phases: Reorienting Adoption
  Strategies
Taiwo A. Adebiyi Nafeezat A. Ajenifuja Ruda Zhang
Digital twin (DT) technology has received immense attention over the years
due to the promises it presents to various stakeholders in science and
engineering. As a result, different thematic areas of DT have been explored.
This is no different in specific fields such as manufacturing, automation, oil
and gas, and civil engineering, leading to fragmented approaches for
field-specific applications. The civil engineering industry is further
disadvantaged in this regard as it relies on external techniques by other
engineering fields for its DT adoption. A rising consequence of these
extensions is a concentrated application of DT to the operations and
maintenance phase. On another spectrum, Building Information Modeling (BIM) are
pervasively utilized in the planning/design phase, and the transient nature of
the construction phase remains a challenge for its DT adoption. In this paper,
we present a phase-based development of DT in the Architecture, Engineering,
and Construction industry. We commence by presenting succinct expositions on DT
as a concept and as a service and establish a five-level scale system.
Furthermore, we present separately a systematic literature review of the
conventional techniques employed at each civil engineering phase. In this
regard, we identified enabling technologies such as computer vision for
extended sensing and the Internet of Things for reliable integration.
Ultimately, we attempt to reveal DT as an important tool across the entire life
cycle of civil engineering projects and nudge researchers to think more
holistically in their quest for the integration of DT for civil engineering
applications.