The CIO Strategy Council is inviting comments on a draft first edition of a new standard for digital twins for built environments.
These models are context-rich digital representations of buildings and communities. With two-thirds of the global population projected to live in cities by 2050, digital twins are becoming a vital planning tool, and the market for them is expected to grow to almost U.S.$36 billion by 2025.
Digital Twins combine real-time data from IT systems, IoT sensors and third-party data in a contextual representation of a built environment. Canada has many companies that work with digital twins and have the expertise, talent, and capabilities to rapidly commercialize and scale their solutions. The new draft standard (CAN/CIOSC 106-1) is designed to support these businesses by providing a shared set of criteria that will encourage interoperability, collaboration and accelerated commercialization.
“As the pace at which Canada’s built asset industry undergoes its digitalization continues to accelerate, there is a growing need to ensure consistency in how the built environment gets planned, designed, delivered, maintained and used to fully benefit from this digitalization,” said Érik Poirier, a construction engineering professor at École de Technologie Supérieur. “One of the rapidly emerging trends in this regard is the development and implementation of digital twins for built assets. With this standard, the CIO Strategy Council is setting the groundwork to enable and accelerate the adoption of digital twins for the Canadian built asset industry.”
“We support the efforts of CAN/CIOSC 106-1,” says Mark Fox, director at the University of Toronto School of Cities Urban Data Centre. “We look forward to working with the CIO Strategy Council in developing industry standards to enhance the design, planning and operations of digital twins for built environments.”
Check out the draft standard and share your comments here. The standard is available for public review until January 26, 2022.