Digital Twin of a Design Process: An Exploratory Study

Digital twinning is a new approach to enhance the management of design, planning and construction operations. A construction digital twin aims to enhance the reality capture of ongoing operations using sensing technologies and AI functions to enable proactive process management. While a digital twin is clearly defined in the context of construction operations, where a digital replica is generated out of a physical site; a design digital twin lacks a clear framing as both twins are digital. This paper explores an approach to creating a design digital twin using agent-based simulation to mimic real BIM-based design projects. Accordingly, a digital replica is generated as an agent-based model. In addition, several KPIs are introduced to capture data related to BIM model dynamics. The results show that the suggested KPIs can increase the transparency of the design process, capture development dynamics at the level of BIM model elements, increase situational awareness among designers related to model development status, and identify higher clashing risk zones.