Digital Twins and Civil Engineering Phases: Reorienting Adoption Strategies

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) is pervasively utilized in the planning/design phase, and the transient nature of the construction phase remains a challenge for its DT adoption. In this article, 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.