Advances in affordable computational capability changed engineering fundamentally with the advent of CAD/CAM. It has changed civil engineering too, in disciplines as diverse as materials, site and structure design, and building performance.
Today, it’s even more complex as the Internet of Things promises to connect everything, everywhere, feeding vast amounts of data into engineering management and design systems. Key to managing this dataflow is the digital twin. Digital twin not only facilitates the simulation of complex designs and construction tasks virtually, it allows engineering professionals to feed building performance data into virtual systems, giving unprecedented modelling power to create higher performance, lower cost, safer buildings and systems.