Design and implementation of a smart infrastructure digital twin

There is a critical need to make infrastructure systems more efficient, resilient, and sustainable. Infrastructure systems provide the basis for everyday life and enable the flow of goods, information, and services within urban and regional settings. Providing data-centric solutions to improve this flow is essential. This can only be achieved if we manage to transform passive infrastructure assets into cyber-physical systems. Digital twins bring the opportunity to turn passive infrastructure assets into data-centric systems of systems. This article aims to provide a summary of existing digital twin architectures and exemplify a digital twin design and implementation. To this end, a literature review of digital twin architecture is presented in addition to a case study of a digital twin implementation in smart infrastructure. The case study focuses on a digital twin implementation of a bridge and describes in detail the physical, cyber, integration, and service layers of this implementation. Later in the article, we discuss the learnings from this case study under three main categories – systems perspective, information perspective, and organisational perspective. The findings show the importance of acquiring a systems perspective when designing digital twins today to enable interoperable systems of systems in the future. Furthermore, the findings highlight the vital necessity of data and information management while also considering the multidisciplinary aspects of digital twin design and implementation.