Loading…
Loading…
A play on the saying, "A picture is worth 1,000 words." Perhaps the greatest source of project inefficiency is not a lack of technical knowledge, but an excess of words.
The Communication Challenge in AEC
A digital twin equals 1,000 meetings? You might be saying: “What is that supposed to mean?” — and if you are, I understand. This is my way of quantifying the value of a digital twin. The meaning of this will be explained later in the article. Let’s first discuss the problem at hand:
Usually, construction projects do not fail because nobody had the technical knowledge to complete them. More often, they struggle because knowledge and instructions were fragmented across different people, companies, drawings, schedules and contractual scopes.
Assuming ideal competency, the owner understands the intended outcome; the architect understands the space; the engineer understands the structure; the fabricator understands how the components will be produced; the contractor understands the site; the equipment operator understands what can actually be moved; the trades understand how the work must be performed.
The problem is getting all of those people to understand the same project in the same way, at the same time.
That is where digital twins can deliver their greatest value — as communication tools. My claim: digital twins are communication tools first and simulation tools as a very close (and extremely necessary) second.
1. What Is a Digital Twin?
There is no shortage of debate about what should and should not be called a digital twin.
Some definitions require a live connection between a physical asset and its virtual representation. Under this interpretation, a model does not become a true digital twin until operational data continuously flows between the real and virtual systems.
The Digital Twin Consortium currently defines a digital twin as “an integrated, data-driven virtual representation of real-world entities and processes, with synchronized interaction at a specified frequency and fidelity.” This organization also recognizes digital twin prototypes, which enable designers to evaluate and refine a proposed system's behavior before a physical asset is constructed and synchronized with its virtual counterpart.
That distinction matters in construction because many of the most valuable twins are created before the physical asset exists.
My working definition is therefore more practical:
A digital twin is a virtual emulator of a real or proposed operation, developed with enough behavioral fidelity to answer a defined set of questions.
The important question is not simply, “Is this model connected to a live asset?”
The more useful questions are:
For one project, the required behavior may specifically be the motion of a crane placing structural components. For another, it may only be the control logic of an automated production line. In other applications, the twin’s scope is more broad; it may need to reproduce material flow, worker access, equipment reach, construction sequencing, clash conditions, throughput, or the interaction between several trades in either a factory or construction site setting.
A digital twin does not need to reproduce every property of an operation to be useful. It needs to reproduce the properties that matter to the decision being made.
A high-level conceptual 4D construction sequence with volumetric module masses can therefore be an appropriate digital twin for communicating site logistics that have been done many times. A manufacturing model connected to PLC logic, sensors, robot controllers and an HMI may be appropriate for a new, one of a kind robotic construction facility with custom equipment. Both are twins of the real scenario, but they answer different questions and require very different levels of behavioral augmentation.
The term should not be used carelessly. However, restricting it to one narrow technical implementation overlooks the range of ways that virtual representations can simulate, emulate, test and/or communicate real operations.
2. Digital Twins Are Not New
The terminology is relatively modern, but the underlying idea is not.
Long before computers, however, designers were already creating physical twins models that were a behavioral augmentation of the real thing before it was built.
Antoni Gaudí’s hanging-string model is one of the best examples. A common retelling says that he used this model to design the Sagrada Família. Instead of trying to mimic the behavior of a robot, he we was able to simulate the behavior of a structure.
Gaudí suspended strings and applied small weighted bags to represent structural loads. Gravity pulled the strings into funicular shapes. When the completed model was photographed and the image inverted, the hanging tension system became a compression structure of arches and columns.
It was, in effect, a physical structural simulator.
The model did not reproduce every property of the future building. It did not simulate occupancy, construction scheduling or building operations. It reproduced one critical behavior: the path through which structural loads could be carried primarily through compression.
That is remarkably close to the use-case-driven definition of a digital twin previously stated in this article.
Manufacturing followed a similar progression. Before advanced robot-simulation and offline-programming software became accessible, automotive manufacturing teams used full-scale mockups, taped floor layouts, physical templates and crude cardboard or plywood representations to evaluate equipment placement, operator access, robot reach and potential interference.
Early industrial robots entered automotive production in the 1960s, beginning with relatively limited applications such as material handling and spot welding. The sophisticated virtual robot cells now used to study reach, prevent singularities, assess cycle time, configure tooling and avoid collisions are more advanced descendants of those physical twin planning methods.
The tools have changed. The basic idea has not:
Build a representation of the proposed system, reproduce the behavior that matters and identify problems before committing resources to the real production version.
3. Automotive Manufacturing Versus Construction
A familiar question appears repeatedly in construction:
Why can we not construct buildings the way the automotive industry manufactures cars?
It is an understandable comparison. Automotive manufacturing demonstrates what standardization, automation, repeatability, supply-chain integration and production planning can accomplish.
However, a building is simply not a car.
Automotive factories can produce thousands of similar products from one location and economically distribute them around the world. The transportation system itself is designed around the product. Cars fit on standardized trailers, railcars and ships. Their dimensions, handling requirements and distribution networks are relatively predictable.
Buildings create a different logistical problem. Both the spatial volume and configuration of most buildings are much larger than a typical four-door sedan. Let’s not forget, even buses (comparable to some longer building element lengths) are not manufactured and shipped the same way a Toyota Corolla is.
A completed building cannot usually be transported economically from a centralized factory - its route must be carefully controlled. Even individual building assemblies can become difficult to ship once their dimensions exceed practical transportation envelopes. A wall or floor panel (non-volumetric building elements) may be transportable; however, unless that panel factory has a production system that accommodates and is supplying every single construction project within a narrowed region (let’s say an entire neighborhood at least and a city at most) - it may not justify the cost of this factory nor the cost of shipping.
The economic advantages of automotive-style production also depend on repetition. A car manufacturer may produce hundreds of thousands of nearly identical units. Construction projects are more frequently affected by different sites, foundations, climates, building codes, owners, architectural requirements, utility conditions and transportation constraints.
This does not mean that construction cannot become more like manufacturing. It means that the transition must reflect the physical and commercial realities of construction.
For the foreseeable future, the greatest opportunity is not necessarily a single assembly line producing completed buildings. It is a network of flexible, automated and efficient prefabrication shops producing reconfigurable, repeatable (within a responsibly parametric reconfiguration window) building components and building elements.
These facilities may manufacture:
These facilities can be best planned using appropriate digital twining technology.
Forget the image of a continuous automotive line where nearly identical complete buildings or building elements are lined up back to back and roll out of the factory door ready to ship.
The nearer-term future is a digitally coordinated production system in which building components or building elements are efficiently prepared, shipped within practical limits in neatly nested bundles and brought to site for ready installation. Factory-style shop, but not automotive factory style. A constant feedback loop between the shop floor and the site is critical to try to avoid any site surprises.
Beyond that may come larger “mega-factories” producing standardized building elements, building modules or component packages for a repeatable type of building. Large factories, operations or systems already exist among many steps of the supply chain for building materials and components. But the immediate opportunity for a paradigm shift is flexible prefabrication — not forcing buildings into a production model developed for cars.
Digital twins are especially useful in this environment because they provide a common communication layer between design, manufacturing, logistics and field installation.
4. Quantifying Communication Inefficiency in Construction
Digital twins exist across an enormous range of complexity.
At one end, a twin may be a 4D simulation or technical animation showing the sequence of crane lifts, the objects being lifted, the movement of delivery vehicles and the installation of several components and building elements for a human-controlled site operation. EZ4D (scroll to the bottom of the Products page), a software asset in development by ngen squared, is one the industry’s lowest barrier to entry for these types of 4D simulations.
At the other end, it may be a highly detailed, photorealistic manufacturing simulation containing industrial robots, manual labor, sensors, material flow, machine behavior, control logic, PLC signals, HMI interaction and validated cycle-time assumptions.
Tools such as RoboDK can simulate industrial robots, study reach and collisions, generate offline programs and estimate cycle times. Properly set up simulations can ensure that robots are capable of doing the task at hand before the robot is even purchased.
Platforms such as realvirtual can extend a model into virtual commissioning by connecting simulated drives, sensors and material flow to real or simulated PLC logic – with link to a virtually operatable HMI. If properly set up, this allows sequence errors, signal problems and interlock failures to be identified before the control system meets the physical machine.
Between these previously mentioned extremes are dozens of useful applications:
How Many Words Is a Simulation Worth?
Consider a 5 minute (300 second) simulation played at 30 frames per second:
300 seconds × 30 frames per second = 9,000 frames or 9,000 pictures
Now apply the familiar expression that “1 picture is worth 1,000 words”:
9,000 pictures × 1,000 words per picture = 9,000,000 words
Rounded up, a 5 minute concept simulation could be described as being worth approximately 10 million words.
At an assumed speaking rate of 150 words per minute, a 1 hour meeting contains roughly 9,000 spoken words. By this deliberately provocative calculation, a 5 minute simulation could contain the communication capacity of approximately 1,000 one-hour meetings.
This is not a scientific measure of information.
Many consecutive frames are similar. The “1,000 words” expression is a proverb, not an conversion factor. A meeting also allows questions, negotiation and discussion that a visual alone cannot provide. Wouldn’t it be nicer to have more efficient meetings where the questions asked are facilitated by a common representative ground that everyone can understand?
But the calculation illustrates something important: visual communication is extraordinarily dense.
A drawing may show where an object belongs. A schedule may show when it is required. A specification may explain how it must perform. A simulation can show all three simultaneously.
It can show:
This is not merely more information. It is information presented in a form that people from different disciplines can interpret together.
If you reached this point of the article, and you truly absorbed this analogy, congratulations, you most likely understand or agree with what digital twins, 4D simulations and technical animations can help solve in Construction.
The Cost of Miscommunication
Construction projects are built by many independent organizations working toward a common objective. Owners, architects, engineers, fabricators, equipment suppliers, contractors and trades each possess different information, priorities and responsibilities. When these perspectives are not effectively communicated, coordination problems are almost inevitable.
Miscommunication rarely appears as a single catastrophic failure. More often, it reveals itself through countless small inefficiencies: work being completed out of sequence, assumptions being made between disciplines, inaccessible equipment, clashes that were never identified, crews waiting for clarification, unnecessary rework and costly delays during commissioning.
No digital twin can eliminate every unforeseen issue. Site conditions change, designs evolve and people make decisions that no simulation can fully predict. However, many coordination and operational challenges are entirely foreseeable when a project team can visualize how people, equipment and materials are expected to interact before construction begins.
A problem discovered during design is typically far less expensive than the same problem discovered during fabrication, construction or commissioning. The value of a digital twin is therefore not that it predicts the future with 100% perfect accuracy — it is that it provides the project team with a shared understanding of the intended operation while changes are still relatively inexpensive to make.
5. Digital Twins as a Shared Project Language
A project cannot remain in planning forever. Eventually, construction must begin.
The answer is not to simulate every bolt, every worker movement and every minute of the project. That would often cost more than the uncertainty being managed.
The answer is to identify the decisions that carry the greatest operational risk and simulate them at the appropriate level of detail.
Most medium and large organizations already have the resources to commission a targeted digital twin or 4D simulation during design. The cost is often small relative to the cost of site delays, repeated mobilization, equipment standby, rework or commissioning problems.
More importantly, a digital twin creates an environment in which different participants can challenge the same proposed operation.
Imagine bringing the following people into one project review:
A conventional meeting may produce ten different interpretations of a drawing and ten different assumptions about the work.
A simulation gives the group something specific to challenge:
The model becomes a shared language.
The CEO does not need to interpret a robot program or understand a lift chart. The forklift operator does not need to understand the complexities behind an architectural detail. The architect does not need to know how to operate a forklift. Each person can see the operation and requirements through the other party’s lens, recognize the part affecting their scope and contribute practical knowledge before the decision becomes expensive.
That is the central value of a digital twin in construction.
It is not merely a model of an asset. It is a model of how people, equipment, materials, information and decisions must work together.
Build, Simulate and Validate Before you Commit to the Build
At ngen squared, we develop digital twins for manufacturing, 4D construction simulations, multidisciplinary coordinated structural models and technical animations that help project teams see their operations before committing to them physically.
Our work supports:
The objective is not to produce a visual just for marketing (although a visually rich digital twin can double as that).
The objective is to buy back time.
Time otherwise spent explaining the concept. Time spent coordinating disconnected disciplines. Time spent discovering conflicts in the field. Time spent waiting for revised instructions. Time spent commissioning equipment that should have been tested virtually.
A relatively small investment during design can prevent disproportionately expensive problems during fabrication, construction and commissioning.
Bring us the operation that is difficult to explain, difficult to coordinate or too expensive to get wrong.
We will turn it into something your entire project team can see, understand, challenge and improve — before it costs much more to change than a couple mouse clicks.
Let’s put an end to the negligent “whoops,” “oops,” and “oh well” moments that get redirected into blame or swept under the rug. Bring next generation ingenuity to your next project to make synergy, positive collaboration and accountability the theme of your project.
Visit www.ngen2.com to learn more. Thank you for reading this article.
P.S.
Digital twins and simulations are not a replacement for words. Words are necessary, however, should be used more efficiently. This article is 2,956 words, a fraction of the words in a meeting and would probably not effectively be replaced with a digital twin ;) thank you for reading. If you enjoyed reading this article as much as I enjoyed creating it, follow our page, bookmark our website and reach out.
