Accelerating Digital Twinning Deployment

Opportunity

Digitalisation is a global trend, with digital twinning technology increasingly adopted in various industrial segments, including smart factories and plants, digital facility management, operation and maintenance, as well as building and construction. There is a growing demand for the rapid generation of digital twins for physical environments.  

Conventionally, digital twins are generated using design software, requiring professional modellers to spend substantial design time, depending on the complexity of the physical twin and available manpower. BIM is increasingly being used as a representation for digital twins. For existing environments, scan-to-BIM technology and authoring software products are used to reconstruct BIM models from LiDAR-scanned point clouds. However, this manual process is often time-consuming, tedious and error-prone, with meshed models frequently used for visualisation purposes. 

Technology

This invention offers an integrated solution capable of autonomously scanning physical environments using robotic LiDAR cameras. It automatically stitches scanned point clouds using in-house developed software algorithms, recognises BIM components, as well as mechanical and electrical plumping through innovated AI techniques. Additionally, it automatically converts the reconstructed BIM to point cloud in IFC 4.0 format (not mesh models). This solution significantly reduces manpower needs, improving productivity from days or weeks to mere hours.  

To further enhance digital twin creation and implementation, the inventors of this technology seek collaboration with partners such as builders, government agencies, smart city or smart factory planners, construction project management service providers, as well as architecture, engineering and construction companies.

Figure 1: Data collection by robotic LiDAR or human with backpack device; Point cloud data and 3D modelling using in-house developed software algorithms.

Applications & Advantages

Main application areas include building and construction, safety, oil and gas, among others. Potential applications include audit and inspection, altering and addition, construction project management, development of smart cities, smart factories, smart process plants and smart power grids. Further, a cloud-based solution can be positioned as a product of this technology. 

Advantages: 

• Significantly improves upon current manual conversion, ensuring accurate BIM representation (not mesh models) from LiDAR scanned point clouds.  

• Offers a unique value proposition with substantial productivity improvement by swiftly reconstructing BIM (not mesh models) in IFC 4.0 format.