Modelling and Visualizing Urban Construction Logistics and Environmental Effects with Digital Twins

In urban settings, where cities want to pursue ambitions of clean air and zero emission transport, the construction industry with its heavy freight encounters greater difficulties and challenges than other sectors to meet the increasingly stringent emission reductions and building codes. Various construction innovations have been deemed to improve construction logistics. Solutions are offered to increase logistics efficiency, reduce construction transport movements, and related emissions.

Governments are aiming their policy instruments at incentivizing and enforcing these reductions and addressing the mitigation of other urban effects, such as reducing road damage, safety issues, disruptions and congestion. Governments and firms want to assess and demonstrate the effects of new policies and logistics measures taken in advance. Digital Twins (DT) can play a role here. However previous DT applications have often been representing building as objects statically, and not necessarily representing building as a process dynamically, including logistics, transport movements and the environmental effects including emissions.

The goal of this paper is to present a research through design approach to develop and test a DT application for modelling construction logistics, and visualizing the environmental effects. By doing so, the approach has intended to explore and demonstrate the use of DT to show the feasibility of logistics innovations. The research reported has assessed the application possibilities of DT to model and interpret construction processes and logistics, and visualizing dynamic parameters including transport movements and environmental effects. The application has been illustrated through a practical case in the city of Utrecht in the Netherlands.