Digital twin framework for visual exploration of material flows and carbon impacts of engineered wood supply chains from forest to buildings

Engineered wood products (EWP) can achieve a better environmental performance i.e. a lower carbon footprint than most conventional building materials, mostly due to the high carbon storage potential of such products and production processes with lower carbon emissions. Increasing the use of EWP in new built and renovation can thus play a major role for the transformation of the built environment into a large-scale carbon sink. The necessity to make the impact of this use both as a whole and in detail measurable and to directly make the optimization impact visible, the Forest2Building Digital Twin Framework (F2BDF) has been developed. The F2BDF aims at a holistic view of the entire wood construction supply chain and the whole life cycle, including all steps from forest biological production and supply of raw materials, to processing and engineering of products, their installation and use in buildings, and their recovery during deconstruction. The open framework provides a backbone for interconnecting digital twins and harvesting of data across different steps and scales of the supply chain for analytical and predictive purposes. Visual data exploration tools provide insight into material flows, traceability, pinpointing hotspots for optimizing industrial processes, and enable information-based decision making.