BIM 2022
by: Eric Wing
What is a Digital Twin? T
hat seems to be the question of the year. What exactly is a digital twin? I’m asked that question almost as much as I ask the same question myself. After about a year of trying to dive into the subject I didn’t come up with a lot of answers, but drew a lot of honest questions.
twins but very few folks actually want to dive in and take responsibility for it. It happens to the best of us. I think the fake Pie Chart below sums up most presentations you’ll see on the subject.
A BIM REBRANDING?
Yep. It’s a rebranding of BIM. Autodesk simply can’t seem to, or won’t produce a viable interface between Revit, Navisworks, Civil 3D (and whatever else they acquired that month) to a typical end user who could actually use the data for facility management. I think the term BIM is finally running out of marketability. They’ve already made word salad out of what the B the I and the M actually means. I’m a BIM Director and I can’t explain to people what my title means. Why not just rebrand something instead of coming up with something solid and new? Piecing together hundreds of Revit models for huge buildings with multiple projects going on over the span of years is, in almost every instance, undoable. Ever upgrade a Revit model and have a warning saying that 300 taps must be attached to a duct? I wonder if that’s going to cause any issues. I don’t want to be the person having to deal with that. Neither does anyone else. Another issue is, it seems everyone wants to talk about the 6
SO, WHAT IS A DIGITAL TWIN TECHNICALLY?
Over the past few years I have worked with PhD students, clients, and colleagues on that definition. It
AUGIWorld Magazine | December 2021 augi.com