Digital Twin Technologies towards Understanding the Interactions between Transportation and Other Civil Infrastructure Systems

69A3551747119Digital Twin (DT) technology is the next step in the gradual shift from physical to digital models in civil engineering. Computer-Aided Drafting (CAD) revolutionized the industry by reducing the time and costs associated with documenting design. Building Information Modeling (BIM) has eliminated the need for physical design descriptors (i.e., drawings or physical models). DT models build off CAD and BIM but are utilized over the operational life of the infrastructure as a management tool. A DT is a relevant abstraction of the physical asset; it is most frequently used to model, improve, and control manufacturing systems. Civil engineering applications using DTs have been emerging, but transportation infrastructure represents a challenging extension of DT technology because of its spatial scale, as well as its voluminous and time-varying data. However, DT is a powerful decision support tool for the design, maintenance, and management of transportation infrastructure, particularly for studying its interdependencies with other infrastructure systems, which is of relevance to smart cities. The primary objective of this research was to explore the effectiveness of DT technology as a tool to visualize and understand interactions between transportation and other related civil infrastructure systems