Assistants for healthy, safe, and productive virtual construction design, operation & maintenance using a digitial twin
Ashvin aims at enabling the European construction industry to significantly improve its productivity, while reducing cost and ensuring absolutely safe work conditions, by providing a proposal for a European wide digital twin standard, an open source digital twin platform integrating IoT and image technologies, and a set of tools and demonstrated procedures to apply the platform and the standard proven to guarantee specified productivity, cost, and safety improvements. The envisioned platform will provide a digital representation of the construction product at hand and allow to collect real-time digital data before, during, and after production of the product to continuously monitor changes in the environment and within the production process. Based on the platform, Ashvin will develop and demonstrate applications that use the digital twin data. These applications will allow it to fully leverage the potential of the IoT based digital twin platform to reach the expected impacts (better scheduling forecast by 20%; better allocation of resources and optimization of equipment usage; reduced number of accidents; reduction of construction projects). The Ashvin solutions will overcome worker protection and privacy issues that come with the tracking of construction activities, provide means to fuse video data and sensor data, integrate geo-monitoring data, provide multi-physics simulation methods for digital representing the behavior of a product (not only its shape), provide evidence based engineering methods to design for productivity and safety, provide 4D simulation and visualization methods of construction processes, and develop a lean planning process supported by real-time data. All innovations will be demonstrated on 10 real-world construction projects across Europe. The Ashvin consortium combines strong R&I players from 11 EU member states with strong expertise in construction and engineering management, digital twin technology, IoT, and data security / privacy.