Digital Twins to Enable Smart Heritage Facilities Management: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate theoretical and practical links between applications of digital twin (DT) and heritage facilities management (HFM) in order to identify future applications of DT in HFM through a systematic review of the rapidly expanding DT literature. A systematic literature review strategy was developed based on three research questions: what are (1) the current relationship between ID and HFM, (2) existing gaps between DT and HFM and (3) future trend of applying DT on BHM? The results of the literature review show that first, the studies on adopting DT in the disciplines architecture, engineering, construction and operation (AECO) have been growing in the past few years, especially from 2018 to 2020; second, among the identified papers, a major portion of the literature focuses on investigating DT’s application in maintenance, operation, facilities management and asset management from both the building level and smart city level; third, heritage conservation calls for digital solutions for problems related to performance monitoring and predictive maintenance. The implication of this study is that DT application in HFM is that DT shall be integrated with heritage building information modelling (HBIM) to facilitate efficient data management and HBIM-based mechanism for DT development is needed for future HFM.