A multivocal literature review of digital twins, architectures, and elements in civil engineering

Structural health monitoring strategies in civil engineering increasingly leverage digital twins, supporting predictive maintenance and data-driven decision-making. Despite the widespread adoption of digital twin applications in structural health monitoring (SHM), there is a lack of agreement on a common definition of digital twins. Although a significant number of digital twin definitions have been proposed and a plethora of reviews have been published, little emphasis has been given to digital twin architectures and internal elements. This paper presents a multivocal review of digital twins in civil engineering, aiming to provide a panorama of the digital twin landscape in civil engineering with explicit insights into the architectures and internal elements used in digital twin applications. From a methodological standpoint, the review follows a twofold approach that encompasses (i) peer-reviewed, indexed literature (“white literature”) as well as (ii) non-indexed sources (“gray literature”) that include industrial digital twin applications. Furthermore, drawing from the review results, a digital twin definition is formulated and a generic digital twin reference architecture is proposed. It is expected that the definition and the generic reference architecture proposed in this study may serve as a blueprint for digital-twin-based SHM applications, with significant implications for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers in structural health monitoring.

Subjects

digital twin architectures

digital twin elements

Digital twins

multivocal literature review

reference architecture

DDC Class

004: Computer Sciences

624.1: Structural Engineering

Publication version

publishedVersion

Lizenz

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Name

150_manuscript.pdf

Type

Main Article

Size

554.36 KB

Format

Adobe PDF

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A multivocal literature review of digital twins, architectures, and elements in civil engineering