Digital twin-driven strategic demolition plan for circular asset management of bridge infrastructures

Economic growth plays an important role in the rapid increase in construction of transportation and bridge infrastructures, which in turn causes enormous greenhouse gas emissions contributing directly to climate change. An innovative and effective method, so-called Building Information Modeling (BIM), to sustainably manage detailed lifecycle of infrastructures, has been recently adopted to revolutionise the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry. Its major function is to sustainably optimise all detailed stages of an infrastructure asset’s lifecycle. A three-dimensional architectural BIM incorporating three additional dimensions (time, cost, and carbon emissions) has then been created in this study to virtualise the whole lifecycle performance of bridge infrastructure through BIM data. For circular asset management, multi-scale details of assets and infrastructures are indispensable. On this ground, these information dimensions are highly critical to asset managers to assure not only public safety, but also sustainability over the whole lifecycle. It is thus critical to quantify carbon footprint in order to identify better alternative solutions for construction and maintenance, resulting in carbon neutrality and carbon credit. Our digital twin (DT), driven by the BIM, has embedded demolition scenarios whose lifecycle cost and carbon footprint can be quantified and optimized simultaneously. Our study is the first to also demonstrate circular end-of-life management through strategic demolition planning that enhances circular economy practice. This aspect is novel and has not been commonly adopted in practice. Our study reveals that the construction stage of the asset lifecycle for this study is the main contributor to carbon emissions and costs stemming from raw materials and their productions. This eventually leads to significant waste at the end of asset’s life, requiring strategic demolition plan to maximise reuse, repurpose, and recycle of materials, parts and components. Our innovative DT is capable of dealing with the cradle-to-cradle lifecycle management. Another co-benefit of using the BIM-based digital twin is to minimise streamlining design, re-work, mitigating risk, and real time processing of design changes in all stakeholders, reducing the effect on carbon emissions, costs, and time schedules. All dimensions (i.e. 6D) can be updated and re-calculated in real time when cross-linked with inspections and condition monitoring, generating real-time digital twin driven solutions.