Application and enabling digital twin technologies in the operation and maintenance stage of the AEC industry: A literature review

Abstract

Digital Twin (DT), which emerged in the manufacturing industry, has recently attracted much attention in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry. At present, in the whole life cycle of an object in the AEC industry, it is mostly applied in the operation and maintenance (O&M) stage. Although there is a lot of DT application research, these studies are scattered across different topics in different engineering objects of the AEC industry. The common application strategy for the applications of DT in the O&M stage of the AEC industry has not yet been fully understood. So many fresh researchers who want to apply DT to new problems in the field are not clear which technologies should be used and how to organise them together. In this regard, the optional enabling technologies are given based on a bibliometric search, and a complete common strategy for DT application in the O&M stage of the AEC industry is established, which supplements the theory of the AEC field. Meanwhile, the existing gaps and research opportunities at the technical level are secondly identified. To achieve this goal, there are 825 publications related to DT applications in the AEC industry O&M stage are analysed, published between 2016.1.1 and 2023.7.28. The digital twin enabling techniques are summarised from four aspects in the paper. Firstly, the common technologies used in different current research topics are concluded and analysed in the review. Then, the enabling technologies for digital twin are concluded systematically from the perspective of the digital twin five-dimensional model. Thirdly, integrating technologies commonly used for each component based on widely recognised strategies for digital twin applications, a digital twin application technology strategy is finalised for the AEC industry O&M stage. Finally, the future work is concluded at the end of the article.