A Requirements Study on Model Repositories for Digital Twins in Construction Engineering

Building information modeling is becoming the preferred tool-assisted methodology in civil and construction engineering for the design, management, and creation of digital replicas of buildings. However, current tool support for creating and managing these twins is limited as of lacking interoperability at the model level. Yet, the Industry foundation classes describe a standardized format for exchanging models and data of buildings and bears a strong resemblance to the class- and object-based nature of the Unified modeling language. From this resemblance, we postulate the application of model-driven engineering for establishing a model repository as an open collaboration platform in Building information modeling. Based on our experience from ongoing and concluded interdisciplinary research projects in civil and construction engineering and computer science, in this paper, we seminally elicit requirements for such a model repository.