Digital twin enhanced BIM to shape full life cycle digital transformation for bridge engineering

BIM has been playing a pivotal role during the last decade in bringing in revolutionary and systematic changes, especially for the design and construction stages in bridge engineering; while the emerging Digital Twin (DT) technology, mainly applied in the operation and maintenance phases, has great potential to shape a DT-enhanced BIM framework to fully enable whole life cycle digital construction. However, the current adoption of DT in bridge engineering causes conceptual and technical confusion, which hinders the technology fusion to achieve its full potential. This paper aims at filling the gap by conceptualizing a DT-enhanced BIM framework from the perspective of bridge engineering. In total, 116 documents on BIM and DT were reviewed, compared, and analyzed; a crucial metrics based performance hierarchy for bridge digital twin was concluded and a DT-enhanced BIM framework was proposed to promote full lifecycle digital bridge engineering implementation. Furthermore, the analysis and conceptual development align well with the existing mature BIM framework and are expected to contribute actively to the future development of BIM and DT and their integrated advanced technologies.