[Timothy Ståhle]

Thank you @Rich Draper, for sharing your thoughts and experience. It’s interesting to learn that you decided on Revit for your entire portfolio. For us however, being a government owned organisation, that’s not possible. Because we are government owned, we are bound by the EU public procurement regulation which restricts the procuring organisation from specifying requirements for suppliers to only use one specific technology e.g. Revit (or any other technology for that matter). This regulation is supposed to protect competition but poses a problem for the procuring organisation. And because we manage updates of our CAD-library through vendors, we would need to demand specific procurement requirements from vendors to only use the CAD-software of our choice which is not permitted. So, my thoughts are, either the IFC-standard needs changing so that the geometries can be edited, or the EU regulation needs to change because this is a huge barrier to digitalisation in our sector.

What’s the situation in the UK, do you have a similar public procurement regulation?

[Timothy Ståhle]

@HenryFTWhat type of sensors have a GDPR filter?

[Timothy Ståhle]

@DRossiter87, thank you for this post. Your explanation of the requirements for a definition to meet the ISO criteria are very helpful. I would like to approach this topic more from the perspective of the business use case and the purpose of the digital twin. Although the ISO/TS 18101:2019 captures certain aspects of the digital twin, I would argue that it doesn’t fully capture what a digital twin is. I think the definition of the digital twin should be driven by the purpose one wants to achieve with it. One could argue that a “digital asset on which services can be performed that provide value to an organization” is a CAD or a BIM-file (digital asset) that is used to export drawings in PDF (services) is a digital twin. From my point of view a BIM in and of itself is not a digital twin. However, the data from BIM can used to create a digital twin. As an asset owner I often have discussions with architects about digital twins and design engineers often confuse the concept of a digital twin with BIM.

• I would say that the power of the digital twin is the ability for the digital representation of the physical object to connect to it’s physical environment through a function of input and/or outputs e.g. by geographically referencing the model and using meteorological data to perform simulations.
• In the operational phase, when the asset owner receives the AIM (according to ISO 19650), the AIM is not yet a digital twin. It’s only when the asset owner connects the digital representation of the object to its physical environment that it actually becomes a digital twin. That could be achieved by e.g. connecting the AIM to an IoT-platform using data from sensors, booking systems etc.

With these criteria in mind I would propose the following definition “A digital representation of a physical object and its interactions with the environment that creates valuable information.”

What do you think?