Ashtarout Ammar

By Ashtarout Ammar, Hala Nassereddine and Gabriel Dadi

The advent and spread of the COVID-19 pandemic shifted the world’s focus toward investing in social structure projects that would improve urbanization and enhance equity. This shift compiled with the emergence of innovative technologies namely Digital Twins, allowed for investigating new approaches for designing and delivering infrastructures, thus paving the road toward smarter infrastructures. Smart infrastructures achieved by connecting the physical aspect of the infrastructure with its digital aspect will allow for optimizing the performance of infrastructure systems by digitally enhancing the asset value and leveraging the value of asset data. Digital Twins can be applied to several civil infrastructure projects including the transportation sector. Also, Digital Twins can be implemented for different spatial scales, on a national level, on the level of the city, and for a network of assets. Few case studies described how to transfer a Digital Twin vision to practice; thus, this chapter presents the journey for a holistic Digital Twin for a highway system formed of a network of assets by discussing the Why, How, and What framework. A holistic highway Digital Twin will allow for cross-asset data analysis, conducting predictive and preventive maintenance, and efficient resource allocation based on data-driven decision-making.

Part of the book: Critical Infrastructure