Digital twins in infrastructure: definitions, current practices, challenges and strategies

When combined with information and communication technologies and powerful data analytic algorithms such as artificial intelligence, digital twins enable organisations to conserve physical resources. This applies both during the design phase and when performing diagnostic and predictive analyses during operations. These abilities bring significant opportunities to the infrastructure industry to develop new ways of designing, constructing, operating and monitoring infrastructure at a time when much of the world’s civil infrastructure is ageing and showing signs of deterioration. This study aims to find out how digital twins can help the infrastructure industry to deliver and operate sustainable and smart infrastructure assets. This paper presents an overview of digital twin definitions, current practices, benefits and challenges through a series of semi-structured expert interviews with executives from the UK infrastructure industry. Additionally, it suggests a series of strategies to aid digital transformation and digital twin adoption in the industry. Results from the interviews illustrated that the executives involved in digital transformation in the infrastructure industry are very well aware of the definitions, benefits and challenges of digital twins. In general, they understand the value of digital transformation and specifically digital twins. They know the reasons behind the need for transforming the industry and adopting data-driven concepts such as digital twins. Moreover, the executives interviewed as part of this study mentioned common challenges across different infrastructure domains. The strategies presented are focused on addressing these three main challenges identified and agreed upon by the participants – culture, technology adoption and lack of a skilled workforce. The three main strategies, addressing digital transformation (1), cultural transformation (2) and bridging the skills gap (3), are explained later in this paper. The article concludes by underlining the importance of creating equal opportunities for the current workforce to improve their digital fluency and skillset by providing information about the benefits of digital twins throughout the sector and organisations to improve adoption and the realisation of benefits.