PSI - Issue 64

Chongjie Kang et al. / Procedia Structural Integrity 64 (2024) 1232–1239 Chongjie Kang, Maria Walker, Steffen Marx/ Structural Integrity Procedia 00 (2019) 000 – 000

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Highway Research Institute (2023). The need for bridge maintenance is expected to increase significantly, particularly in terms of extending the life of bridge structures to save material and other resources. To achieve this, significantly more information is required at a much earlier stage than is usual today. All necessary information shall be ideally systematically handled, linked, and centrally presented. To address this, digital methods, particularly the entire concept of a digital twin (DT), are increasingly investigated and implemented within the civil engineering sector. They exhibit significant potential for maintaining and extending the service life of existing construction. In this work, systematic research on the DT in bridge maintenance is performed. Based on the research, the essential components, including the physical entity, the virtual entity, and the data connection of a DT, are elaborated. Subsequently, the technologies used in different layers are briefly introduced. Afterward, the Nibelungen Bridge in Worms, which is the validation structure of the German Research Foundation Priority Programme 2388 Hundert Plus, is presented as a case study in detail. Finally, the major experiences and future challenges are concluded. 2. Research methodology The first step in this research was to identify relevant research papers, which included selecting the target journals. Based on the data from the Scimago Journal Rank, journals that fell into the subject areas of "Civil and Structural Engineering," "Building and Construction," and "Architecture" were completely selected (Q1-Q4). The ISSN numbers of these journals were used to construct the search query. It was also necessary to choose keywords that correspond to research on DT in bridge engineering. Therefore, the following terms were used to construct the search query: "bridge," "DT," "BrIM," "bridge information modelling," "as-is BIM," "existing BIM," "as-is building information modelling," "existing building information modelling," "cyber-physical," and "cyber physical." The authors also used the German terms for DT and bridge to include German papers in the search process and limited the search to publications between 2016 and 2024. A query that combined these two steps and criteria resulted in 197 papers in the Scopus database.

Fig. 1. Literature review process

Subsequently, after manually filtering out irrelevant keywords and corresponding papers, we selected 74 papers that discussed DT applications for bridges in the civil engineering sector. In the end, 10 papers, including various digital model types of DTs, were selected to be elaborated on in the scope of this contribution. 3. DTs in bridge engineering 3.1 Classification of DTs According to Yang et al. (2024), a DT includes a physical entity in the real world, a virtual twin replicating the