Should the Project Plan to construct a digital twin follow the physical plan?

[Colin Hewertson]

Hi guys, so my first post and an opening for discussion. Should the production of the digital twin be tied strictly to the physical construction?

My reasoning for bringing this up is that all too often digital assets are left hanging and incomplete at the end of a project during handover, for a digital twin to be truly effective it needs to be commissioned just like the physical asset with remediation planned in, well into the operational phase. All too often the model authors and those intimate with the data have moved onto other projects with updates and changes being difficult to implement which means the model is already behind when it comes to operations.

It's worth pointing out that my personal experience is in utilities and O&G where assets are large, complex and take time to transfer data to the asset management systems, having a separate and deliberate project plan that takes its queues from the master plan could alleviate many of these handover issues.