D4.3 Digital Twin supported lean project planning, control and risk management

There is a considerable opportunity to improve the planning and control of construction work. The construction industry is still struggling to adopt to the digital revolution’s concepts due to complexity, uncertainty, the fragmented supply chain, the short-term thinking, and the culture of ad hoc solutions. The main purpose of this document is to describe the business and decision-making processes to support lean project planning, control, and risk management with digital twin data.

Additionally, this document also presents and describes a process model that has been developed for the construction phase. In this task, three demo-sites have been investigated. All three projects were building construction projects hence no infrastructure projects have been researched. To describe the designed process model, IDEF0-notation was used. A vital part of using digital twins to support process management and agile planning is the capture of data from the site.

The produced process model contains five different process groups: initiating, planning, implementing, controlling, and closing and is generally based on the demonstration sites within the ASHVIN project and applicable to constructions sites worldwide. From each demonstration site information was gathered considering how data-collection had been conducted on each site using various digital tools and how they corresponded to the different KPI’s within the project. The methods were then analysed and evaluated how they could be implemented in a work breakdown structure (WBS) and location breakdown structure (LBS). These methods in combination with the process model allows the team to detect issues, react and adjust the schedule to make the whole process smoother. It can assist them in planning when to take in certain disciplines and when to order materials.
During this task the demonstration projects were already in the construction phase, which meant that it was mainly controlling activities that could be conducted according to the process model. It would be interesting to be able to test the process model from the beginning of a construction project, in other words from the initiating phase. Multiple findings have been made throughout this study. The main takeaway from is how vital it is for a project to decide in an early stage the prerequisites that will be needed to control and affect the project during the construction phase. This is the reason why it is essential to make sure that the process model as well as the digital tools are applied in depth. The second point to be made is to understand that all the KPI’s mentioned in the results section can be collected using a multitude of different tools and methods.

This report has met its main purpose of describing the business and decision-making processes to support lean project planning, control, and risk management with digital twin data.