Overcoming the Long-Term Barriers to Digital Twinning Usage in the UK Construction Industry

Watts, Gregory; Underwood, Jason; Munir, Mustapha; Maleki Sadabad, Mo; Hales, Derek; Balogun, Teslim; Coates, Paul

Abstract

Adopting Digital Twinning (DT) technology will help the construction industry unlock a wealth of economical, environmental, and societal benefits. These have been outlined in the extant literature, but all largely focus on the immediate benefits attributable to current ways of working, and the immediate barriers the industry faces. Whilst these are key to understand and overcome, an awareness of longer term benefits and barriers is also required. There is a clear gap in current understanding around future potential use and requirements of DT technology, and the resulting barriers DT will bring. The aim of this research is to identify what the future of DT will look like, so that the barriers to any required progress can be identified. Ultimately this will allow strategies to be developed to help overcome such barriers. In-depth interviews with ten leading DT professionals representing a variety of sectors were undertaken to addresses this current knowledge gap. Analysis of the findings reveals several long term projections around data sharing, security, data sets, and hardware components. Awareness of such long term DT projections allows the identification of current barriers, which in turn, allows a greater understanding of how such barriers can be overcome. This research contributes to the current gap in knowledge around the future of DT, and helps identify current requirements that the industry needs to address to ensure the potential of DT is maximised in future.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: SEEDS
• Start Date: Sep 4, 2025
• End Date: Sep 5, 2025
• Acceptance Date: Jun 20, 2025
• Deposit Date: Jun 27, 2025
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed