º£½ÇÊÓƵ

As all industries embrace the digital revolution, the concept of digital twinning is becoming increasingly critical to a wide variety of sectors – from aerospace to oil and gas – and increasingly at every scale of the built environment.

A digital twin creates a virtual representation of real-world entities and processes. For the built environment, a digital twin is therefore a living digital representation of a physical asset, and the activities within it. It is a bridge between the physical and digital world, fusing disparate data sources from the physical asset into the digital world, where it can be processed and mined for transformational insights into the building’s performance and operation. 

Increasingly, º£½ÇÊÓƵ’s experts are developing and managing the digital twins for clients’ physical assets. In a new report, In Conversation with º£½ÇÊÓƵ: Digital Twinning, our team of digital consultants answer some of the most common questions around digital twins, including how a corporate strategy can be built around digital twinning, how clients can get started and where digital twinning technologies could lead them in the coming years. 

“All too often, the term “digital twin” is used to mean different things by different people. To bring clarity, the report shares insights from º£½ÇÊÓƵ’s journey into digital twinning.”

Cristina Savian

Cristina Savian, digital twin advisory and consulting services lead at º£½ÇÊÓƵ, says: “All too often, the term “digital twin” is used to mean different things by different people. This is particularly the case across different industries, but especially in property and construction. To bring clarity, the report shares insights from º£½ÇÊÓƵ’s journey into digital twinning.”

Digital twinning is not a new concept. It was anticipated in the 1991 novel Mirror World and formally defined by academia in the 2000s. The Centre of Digital Built Britain (CDBB) highlights that “investing in a digital twin is rarely a single, one-time effort” – proposing multiple use cases around strategy, assurance and operational management.

º£½ÇÊÓƵ’s report opens a conversation with the wider industry on how a digital twin can be used to drive meaningful cost savings/revenue generation/citizen satisfaction opportunities and competitive advantage for organisations.

Understanding the key technology choices around digital twins is critical. This requires making sense of the jargon and developing technical maturity. “This is ever more important at the intersection of the built world (which operates on a slow development cycle) and the technology world (which operates in fast cycles),” the report notes. 

Read more: .