The Role of Simulation in Digital Twin Construction

Fostered by advances in digital twin and onsite monitoring technologies, the paradigm of Digital Twin Construction (DTC) has emerged as a comprehensive mode of construction that proposes a data-driven lean production planning and control workflow, leveraging project status and design intent information to make proactive production system design changes. Simulation plays an essential role in the DTC paradigm as a provider of predictive situational awareness (SA), a mechanism for data-driven continuous improvement, and an enabler of future autonomous real-time production control systems in construction projects. In this paper, we outline these modes of use of simulation, discuss potential barriers to implementing simulation in DTC workflows, and propose a set of criteria to evaluate a simulation tool’s applicability to DTC.