Digital Twin And BIM

Origin of the Concept

The Digital Twin concept, which has been gaining ground in various domains for the past ten years, has its roots in the aerospace industry.

During the Apollo 13 space mission, to bring back to Earth the damaged spacecraft, NASA specialists created its mathematical model, which, combined with the measurement's signals received from the real object, allowed them to simulate the behaviour of the Apollo 13 and elaborate appropriate control algorithms.

This rescue operation is often considered the first case when the digital twin concept was used for the first time.

Generally speaking, the idea consists of creating a mathematical model of a technical object, first used in the design phase for preliminary calculations.

Then later, at the operation phase, this model (digital twin), in combination with the readings of sensors coming from the real object (physical twin), is used locally or remotely for simulating its behaviour and optimizing control algorithms.

Digital Twin of Residential and Commercial Buildings

At first glance, the rationale for such an application might raise some doubts.

Without diminishing the complexity of a spacecraft, we see that well-known mathematical equations describe its movements when describing its dynamics.

While what happens in a building,…