Digital Twins in the infrastructure sector: a use case for automatic progress monitoring

39% of all contractors in the Dutch construction industry currently experience more than 5% failure costs.
A commonly used instrument to decrease these costs is project management. Project management
focusses on realizing the product within the set constraints of time, costs, and quality. Part of project
management is project planning, this focusses on delivering the product according to the planning. The
importance of progress monitoring in the construction phase is to ensure that a project is delivered
according to schedule. A tool for automatic progress monitoring for groundwork activities in infrastructure
projects using point cloud data is however unavailable, and therefore this thesis focusses on developing
a methodology with technological solutions that enables such. This thesis applies the engineering
research cycle of problem investigation, prototype design, and prototype validation.
A theoretical framework is created for the problem investigation about the technological concepts
required for automatic progress monitoring (i.e. project management, the as-built state, and the asplanned
state) and the state of the art in automatic progress monitoring. Point clouds are chosen as
input data for the tool prototype due to the capabilities of point clouds in capturing volume-based
materials with complex geometry. The system architecture subsequently illustrates the prototype design.
The tool itself is created in Dynamo for Civil 3D, supplemented with custom Python scripting to access
the Civil API. The workflow of the tool can be divided in four categories: data acquisition, information
retrieval, progress estimation, and visualisation. Progress is computed based on the comparison of
actual installed cubic meters ground versus the planned installed cubic meters of ground. The prototype
validation is completed through a use case of an ongoing construction project. This project is a 200.000
m² greenfield development for an industrial area in Venlo. The as-built state is captured in a point cloud
using a drone, and the as-planned state is defined in a 4D BIM model. These are then compared, and
construction progress is successfully derived. The construction progress is visualized using different
methods. It is therefore concluded that the tool prototype is functional. Further optimisations are
recommended to extend the functionality of the tool.