As a team, the 14 CBIM ESRs have succeeded in sharpening their collective vision for the 'Digital Twin' for representing buildings and infrastructure. Although they each work in specific niche areas, their work has coalesced around a set of principles and technologies for achieving this vision:
- The future information architecture is a set of federated information models of buildings stored in the cloud,
- The information models must be comprehensively and intelligently coordinated to maintain internal integrity, presenting the information to users through interfaces tailored for their professional domains,
- The storage mechanisms employ semantic web technologies with data schema defined by publicly available ontologies,
- Appropriate business models and workflow processes must be developed in tandem with development of cloud BIM technologies.
The researchers have further defined, tested and explained their ideas in the set of publications produced so far.
The research has not yet progressed to the stages of demonstrating the precedents contemplated in objective 1(c), which calls for illustrating, through implementation of practical examples, how to best exploit BIM-based digital twins for process modelling and simulation. However, we see no practical barriers to the ESRs developing a convincing set of such demonstrators as they implement the data schema and the software.
Regarding their individual research objectives, the majority of CBIM ESRs have at this point reached a significant milestone, successfully defending their research in their respective candidacy examinations. They have: (i) defined their topics clearly and in detail; (ii) conducted comprehensive literature reviews to generate clear problem statements, problem significance, the start of the art in practice and research, and explicit knowledge gaps, objectives and research questions; (iii) defined their proposed solutions and (iv) conducted initial experiments. They have significantly de-risked their projects via the substantial depth, structure, and clarity they have achieved.
Many have published the initial results in high quality conferences and journals.
Examples of the short-term benefits that the project is already addressing include: new collaborations, sharing new techniques, and infrastructures between academic research groups and industrial partners within the consortium; promotion of awareness of BIM to a wider public through outreach activities in; stimulation of interest in this research field to other scientists and ESRs working in related architecture, engineering and construction fields in Europe through invitations to CBIM training events. Thus far, through its research, training and dissemination activities, CBIM is on track to deliver impact in all these areas.
