Review of digital twins in industry and civil engineering

Digital twins are virtual counterparts of real objects in their whole lifecycle. This concept has gained increasing popularity, also in civil engineering. Civil engineering digital twins comprise several modern techniques, e.g., Building Information Modeling (BIM), Artificial Intelligence, and Structural health monitoring (SHM). Digital twinning, however, is not only the isolated use of these methods but their integration following the idea of comprehensive semantic data-rich models. Digital twinning activities comprise both research and industrial works. This article reviews the current attempts to provide the theoretical backgrounds and propose practical use cases.