Session 3.1
Digital Twins: What does this mean for AEC?
Synopsis:
Digital Twins has been key to marketing the potential of design data translating into operational and predictive, causing a gap in how AEC perceives digital twins and how the growing market of digital twins is being implemented. How does AEC engage with the reality of digital twins in a meaningful way?
Learning Objectives:
1. Interrogate the definition of digital twin in the AEC landscape
2. Explore how digital twins are deployed in non-aec spaces
3. Clarify how digital twins are going to add to the management of design data
4. Explore new business models for built environment data sources
Body:
Digital Twins are digital representations of physical objects, for the purpose of observing, analyzing, and predicting performance of that object, using the combination of static and live data inputs. The term is incredibly divisive in the AEC industry. Digital Twins in other industries are understood, driving large revenues at an accelerating market growth rate, and AEC has an opportunity to engage in this market in a more meaningful way.
The digital twin landscape is far more mature outside of the AECO Industry. Digital Twins generate a market worth $7.86 billion in 2021 to $10.99 billion in 2022 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 39.74%. This includes fields such as Aerospace and Automotive generating Digital Twins to predict the performance of their vehicle design, Healthcare generating Digital Twins to analyze robotic surgical endeavors, and matters of national defense securely monitoring assets. This total value is often misattributed to representing the value of Digital Twins of a very small AECO presence in the industry, where AECO has an inconsistent foothold in the market composition.
This misattribution creates confusion in the service and the term within our industry. If this is worth so much, why are we not seeing it? What is the difference between a digital twin and the monitoring services already present in the building systems? Do architects and engineers generate digital twins in our BIM Software? Do predictive engineering models generate digital twins? How much value do Digital Twins generate in the AECO service model? All these questions are valid, and to answer them all we need to get to the technical core question of “what is the data doing?”.
In this presentation, we will set the stage to discuss the digital twin and its relation to the AECO space. What is the value of it? What is fact, fiction, and marketing hype? And how are firms going to engage with the next evolution of the data documentation wave.
Panellists & Speakers:
Andrew Cole
Stantec
Senior Associate, Product Owner - Buildings Digital Practice | AEC Innovation, Product Design