Literature review of digital twin technologies for civil infrastructure

Evolution of Digital Twin Frameworks in Bridge Management: Review and Future Directions

“…The FEM-based virtual model has been considered as the most prominent numerical technique for bridge DT generation to analyze the structural condition [65]. The virtual model is simply generated using a validated FEM model with commercial FEM software that can not only output mechanical properties, such as displacement or mechanical load, but also facilitate the direct generation of the electric output originating from the sensors that are intricately embedded within the structure, such as electric charges or voltages [14].…”

“…The employment of laser scanning has become widely recognized as a non-contact measuring technique for rapid and precise data collection from an object's surface [45]. Laser scanning systems can be classified into two categories, namely aerial and terrestrial, based on the positioning of the laser sensor during the process of data acquisition [14].…”

“…Digital twins (DTs) have been proposed to enhance the functionality of BrIM through digital transformation of the entire bridge lifecycle and have become increasingly popular for bridge infrastructure management [14]. DT comprises a computational model and a real system that is employed for monitoring in-operation bridges based on multiple sources of data, controlling the operation functionalities, and optimizing the efficiency of the asset [15].…”

“…As DT represents a virtual replica of the physical asset through the BrIM approach, crucial functional areas of the bridge could be assessed during a bridge health monitoring process to generate information on a variety of performance characteristics, such as environmental conditions, loads, and reactions of the structure to those loads. These data could be subsequently applied to the processing system for further structural analysis both at local-element and global bridge scales [14]. By analyzing these data, DTs may recognize potential issues in a system.…”

“…Developing an evolved conceptual framework of bridge digital twin: As the concept of bridge DT includes a wide range of sophisticated capabilities, varying from a simple digital representation of bridge to complicated models with predictive capabilities [14], various mixed definitions/applications have been developed in the literature. Although some attempts have been conducted to establish a lifecycle DT framework [12], there is still a need for an evolved multilayer conceptual framework of DT for proactive bridge monitoring.…”