dRofus & Digital Twins
Digital Twins, along with AI, have become the latest buzzwords in architecture, engineering, construction, and operations (AECO) technology circles, but you might have some questions:
- Are you fuzzy about the exact purpose of a Digital Twin?
- Is dRofus a Digital Twin?
- Why would you want to use dRofus and a Digital Twin solution?
Read on to get answers to those questions and more!
WHAT IS A DIGITAL TWIN?
All the major AECO software vendors are advertising and marketing their own Digital Twin platform(s) and many startups are also in the market. Some vendors have an existing history of deep cloud technology offerings, while others are nearly brand-new to the market.
Digital Twins have their roots in manufacturing and product development, where for some time, it has been fundamentally easier to capture the object virtually, and capture performance attributes of the physical object to feed to the digital ‘twin’ (Miskinis, 2019).
Digital Twins have gained popularity in the AECO sector for several intersecting reasons:
- Continued expansion and availability of broadband cellular networks; higher speed ubiquitous Wi-Fi, decreasing price point on bandwidth in general.
- Decreasing price point(s) for sensors (temperature, humidity, flow, motion, etc.) and accompanying chips, boards and radios for local data processing and transmission.
- Maturity of cloud-based technologies and platforms, particularly those able to ingest, transform and store large quantities of ‘real-time’ data.
- Mechanical, Electrical and Plumbing control systems increasing adoption of modern technology; digital data sensing and transmission (in lieu of analog) and PC hosted software based-control platforms.
- Increasing popularity of the creation of three- dimensional models during the design and construction phases of large-scale projects.
The intent of Digital Twins is straightforward