Concept, Creation, Services and Future Directions of Digital Twins in the Construction Industry: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Currently, the engineering problems encountered in digital transformation of the construction industry are very complicated and need to be solved by integrating multiple technologies. Consequently, the concept of digital twin (DT) was introduced and quickly applied throughout the building lifecycle. Despite this, many practitioners lack understanding of DT in the construction industry (DT-CI) and its implementation. To overcome this issue, this paper presents a comprehensive and detailed review of DT-CI through a systematic literature review (SLR) that incorporates both quantitative and qualitative analysis. In this study, 222 DT-CI studies were selected from a pool of 2619 publications across multiple databases, and 43 related researches were supplemented by the backward snowballing method based on co-citation analysis to generate the final bibliographic database. This paper quantitatively analyzes the current state, hotspots, and development trends of DT-CI research through a bibliometric review, and systematically clarifies the concept, creation, services, and future directions of DT-CI through a framework-based review. Finally, based on the SLR outcomes, this paper offers recommendations for future work and DT-CI implementation. Contrary to other reviews within this field, this paper adheres to a rigorous SLR protocol to ensure the reproducibility of review results. Moreover, by comparing construction and non-construction DT concepts, we highlight the unique characteristics of DT-CI, namely its association with building information modeling (BIM) and emphasis on geometric reconstruction of building entities.