AEC Digital Twin Data - Why Structure Matters

With the increasing adoption of the Digital Twin concept in the construction industry in the operations and maintenance phase, researchers and practitioners are increasingly seeking suitable technological solutions for the design and construction phases. While it is widely accepted that the required platforms hosting the digital twin must be cloud-based to fulfill the requirements of ubiquitous accessibility and centralized consistency, questions regarding the need for data schema remain. Some academics argue that a structure-free organization of data is suitable for realizing digital twins and the data streams from and to the respective platform. Hands-on experience in the BIM2TWIN project supports a counter argument, i.e., that structure-free data is insufficient for most use cases around AEC Digital Twins. The sheer information complexity of construction projects requires well-defined data structures enabling unambiguous and error-less interpretation. This becomes apparent when reflecting on the well-established concept of the data-information-knowledge pyramid describing that raw data must be processed into understandable and meaningful high-level information for human decision makers, subsequently providing the basis for cross-project domain knowledge. Based on this observation, we highlight that object-oriented modeling is a widely recognized information modeling technique that facilitates the structuring of complex domain information. We compare it with ontology-based model concepts that provide a similar, yet more abstract means for information modeling.