TwinGen - Technologies for the generation of digital twins as a basis for the operation and maintenance of structural infrastructure

The project is dedicated to the development of approaches for the automated creation of digital twins for the structural infrastructure. It focuses on methods for recording existing structures using various procedures and transferring them into digital models as a basis for operation and maintenance.

In the project, methods are developed to automatically generate digital twins of existing infrastructure structures (e.g. roads, bridges, hydraulic structures) as a basis for operation and maintenance. The sub-procedures to be developed include the recording and processing of point clouds (e.g. by means of laser scanning or photogrammetry), extraction of geometric and semantic information using digital image processing, use of knowledge databases for semantic model generation as well as the evaluation of technical drawings using machine learning. The main activities are development of algorithms, data structures and technical procedures.

The aim is to develop procedures with which high-quality digital twins for existing structures can be generated largely automatically. The main challenge is to extract the semantic information from the as-built documents and the as-built survey to enrich the digital twin accordingly. Furthermore, methods are to be used to assess the condition of a structure on the basis of images and point clouds.