The French engineering firm Egis unveils, through a demonstrator it invented, a concept of light and resilient Digital Twin aimed at local authorities and transport infrastructure operators using, among other systems/platforms, ShareAspace iAIM to federate, maintain and give partners access to their PLM infrastructure data.
Building on more than fifteen years of experience in BIM¹ on its main projects, Egis actively contributes to the development of openBIM digital exchange protocols for infrastructure (Rail IFC ² or MINnD³ initiatives).
At the tradeshow InfraBIM Open 2022, which took place from 10 to 12 January 2022 in Lyon, Egis presented the result of a PoC (Proof of concept) achieved in the second half of 2021 with five partners from the digital and railway sectors: Catenda, Eurostep, Vossloh Cogifer, Ubiplace and CARL Berger-Levrault.
Named connec(t)win, this approach is based on a modular and collaborative vision of the Digital Twin. Rather than a monolithic product requiring both laborious development and integration which would be both long and costly to its clients, Egis imagined and shaped a service based on the connection of applications recently launched on the market (BIM¹, PLM⁴, IoT⁵, field data acquisition apps, etc.) and the reuse of programs already installed in the information systems of local government and operators (for example, CMMS⁶).
The first twins thus emerge much more quickly: this first experiment took merely six months! In addition to the rapidity and the low cost of implementation, the use of openBIM formats such as IFC² or BCF⁷ enables an architecture that will last over time.
This PoC demonstrated the feasibility and effectiveness of this strategy. The connection of existing software and solutions does indeed amplify their respective added values and helps provide a better response to the operational needs of users: quicker access to documentation, contextualisation of alerts, better traceability, continuity of information between one solution and another, easy access on-the-go, etc. This twin concept provides considerable potential for clients by facilitating the development of business applications that are better tailored to address the new challenges of organisations and are easier to use.
¹ BIM = Building Information Modelling; ² IFC = Industry Foundation Classes; ³MINnD = Modélisation des informations interopérables pour les infrastructures durables (Modelling of interoperable data for sustainable infrastructure); ⁴ PLM = Product Lifecycle Management; ⁵ IoT = Internet of Things; ⁶ CMMS = Computer-aided Maintenance Management Systems; ⁷ BCF = BIM Collaboration Format.
