Digital twin-enabled smart facility management: A bibliometric review

Abstract

In recent years, the architecture, engineering, construction, and facility management (FM) industries have been applying various emerging digital technologies to facilitate the design, construction, and management of infrastructure facilities. Digital twin (DT) has emerged as a solution for enabling real-time data acquisition, transfer, analysis, and utilization for improved decision-making toward smart FM. Substantial research on DT for FM has been undertaken in the past decade. This paper presents a bibliometric analysis of the literature on DT for FM. A total of 248 research articles are obtained from the Scopus and Web of Science databases. VOSviewer is then utilized to conduct bibliometric analysis and visualize keyword co-occurrence, citation, and co-authorship networks; furthermore, the research topics, authors, sources, and countries contributing to the use of DT for FM are identified. The findings show that the current research of DT in FM focuses on building information modeling-based FM, artificial intelligence (AI)-based predictive maintenance, real-time cyber–physical system data integration, and facility lifecycle asset management. Several areas, such as AI-based real-time asset prognostics and health management, virtual-based intelligent infrastructure monitoring, deep learning-aided continuous improvement of the FM systems, semantically rich data interoperability throughout the facility lifecycle, and autonomous control feedback, need to be further studied. This review contributes to the body of knowledge on digital transformation and smart FM by identifying the landscape, state-of-the-art research trends, and future needs with regard to DT in FM.