Digital Twinning in Additive Manufacturing (2023-09)¶

As part of the digitization of the AEC industry, the Digital Twin concept is becoming increasingly important. Originating in the manufacturing industry, the concept at its core involves a bidirectional coupling of the physical product and its digital counterpart with the aim of keeping the two in sync. Without appropriate capabilities to realize such synchronization, the concept always remained as an unattainable vision for the AEC industry. Adapting additive manufacturing (AM) for construction, however, creates unique opportunities to realize this vision by enabling automation in both directions, from digital to physical product and vice versa. As a fully automatable manufacturing method where robotic processes are typically controlled by the digital representation of the product, AM realizes the digital-to-physical link for this purpose. Conversely, based on the same digital representation of the product, the acquisition of the physical implementation of the manufacturing process can be automated, enabling the physical-to-digital connection. This paper uses three AM application scenarios to illustrate, on the one hand, the need for automating quality control and, on the other hand, to describe approaches for its realization. In particular, the benefits of synergy between automated quality control (QC) and fabrication information modeling (FIM) to form a digital-physical-digital loop are explored.