Agile Construction Digital Twin Engineering

Digital twins have attracted a lot of attention recently. However, the current manifestations are merely digital shadows, lacking means for bidirectional data exchange, which makes their use for assisting the construction of buildings much more difficult. We argue that this is due to the lack of a systematic process for developing a digital twin during a building’s life cycle. We argue to look for a solution by combining agile engineering with IT change management to establish an agile, change-driven process for engineering digital twins. Such a process, of course, deserves a qualitative assessment of the engineering process and the resulting digital twin. In the future, it should be possible to obtain a digital twin from a BIM-based design process by applying IT change management in an agile manner. This should happen under maximum automation and life cycle orientation. Our proposal is motivated by several years of interdisciplinary collaboration between civil engineering and computer science and evaluated using the Technology Acceptance Model. While the TAM is not specifically designed for digital twin methodologies, its application here aims to assess perceived usefulness and ease of use of DT methodologies from the user’s perspective, without addressing scalability concerns. This aims to provide actionable insights to guide the refinement of the process model, aligning it with user requirements and achieving its intended outcomes. Our evaluation confirms the proposed process’s perceived usefulness and ease of use, with robust correlations indicating strong acceptance potential among stakeholders. These results highlight the feasibility of the proposed approach and its alignment with expectations in real-world applications.

Dieses Werk wurde unter der Creative-Commons-Lizenz Namensnennung 4.0 International (CC-BY 4.0) veröffentlicht und darf unter den Lizenzbedinungen vervielfältigt, verbreitet, öffentlich zugänglich gemacht, sowie abgewandelt und bearbeitet werden. Dabei muss der Urheber bzw. Rechteinhaber genannt und die Lizenzbedingungen eingehalten werden.