Periodic Reporting for period 3 - Ashvin (Assistants for Healthy, Safe, and Productive Virtual Construction Design, Operation & Maintenance using a Digitial Twin)
Reporting period: 2022-10-01 to 2024-03-31
ASHVIN aims at enabling the European construction industry to significantly improve its productivity, while reducing cost and ensuring absolutely safe work conditions, by providing a proposal for a European wide digital twin standard, an open-source digital twin platform integrating IoT and image technologies, and a set of tools and demonstrated procedures to apply the platform and the standard proven to guarantee specified productivity, cost, and safety improvements. The envisioned platform will provide a digital representation of the construction product at hand and will allow to collect real-time digital data before, during, and after production of the product to continuously monitor changes in the environment and within the production process. Based on the platform, ASHVIN will develop and demonstrate applications that use the digital twin data. These applications will allow it to fully leverage the potential of the IoT based digital twin platform to reach the expected impacts (better scheduling forecast by 20%; better allocation of resources and optimization of equipment usage; reduced number of accidents; reduction of construction projects). The ASHVIN solutions will overcome worker protection and privacy issues that come with the tracking of construction activities, provide means to fuse video data and sensor data, integrate geo-monitoring data, provide Multiphysics simulation methods for digital representing the behaviour of a product (not only its shape), provide evidence based engineering methods to design for productivity and safety, provide 4D simulation and visualization methods of construction processes, and develop a lean planning process supported by real-time data.
At the start of the project, we launched a first version of the platform available at iot.ashvin.eu. This platform was continuously updated to ensure integration with the digital platform. Data from the demonstration cases have been collected on the platform and the platform has been applied on an additional 18 projects across Europe. User authentication and management interfaces have been continuously improved and provided in a final version. A standardization plan was advised that identified the standardization gap, and proposed the focus of the future standardization efforts to be undertaken by the industry, future standardization efforts are supported by the provision of edge computing concepts for digital twin supported construction sites, by an ontology and an API for digital twin platforms, by the suggestion of privacy, as well as Health and Safety recommendations and a proposal for general digital twin processes, and a proposal for KPIs for designing for improved safety, productivity, and resource efficiency , as well as, KPIs to plan and monitor productive, resource-efficient, and safe construction sites. The project results have been extensively disseminated in social media and scientific publication outlets. Detailed plans for further commercial exploitation of the crucial aspects of the project have also been developed, centering around the ten tools developed to TRL 6 on the project.
The designed ASHVIN platform provides a digital representation of the construction product at hand and allows to collect real-time digital data before, during, and after production of the product to continuously monitor changes in the environment and within the production process. Based on the platform, ASHVIN develop and demonstrated 10 tools that use these digital twin data and that help engineers to improve the resource efficiency, productivity, and safety of their projects. These tools fully leverage the potential of the IoT based digital twin platform to reach the expected impacts (better scheduling forecast by 20%; better allocation of resources and optimization of equipment usage; reduced number of accidents; reduction of construction projects). Supporting the tool development a number of highly innovative data fusion and data analytics methods have been proposed to transform IoT data from construction sites into actionable data on the digital twin site. Additionally, all aspects required as input for a EU wide digital twin standard have been developed covering technical aspects (IoT, edge computing, APIs, ontology), process related aspects (process guidelines, use cases for digital twin use), and social/ethical aspects, such as a guideline for digital twin data privacy, as well as digital twin supported health and safety,