At the second edition of GeoSmart Infrastructure conference, Nitin Gadkari, Union Minister, Ministry of Roads, Transport and Highways (MoRTH) addressed the audience virtually. He said, “Infrastructure is regarded as the backbone of India’s ambition of $5billion economy.”
He further added that one of the major challenge that we face in the infrastructure development is delay of the processes from few months to years. These delays lead to loss of resources, material, and creation of wastage.
The cause of the delay in the system is difficult to identify, this where the adoption of digital twin will help us address the challenge.
He said, “Digitalization would provide impetus to the construction and infrastructure sector by fostering a collaborative mechanism, and ensuring qualitative enhancement, transparency and effective decision-making.
“By enabling virtual replicas, we can identify real-time monitoring, effective maintenance and simulation of various projects. You can check the quality of material used, at what is the stage of the project, how long will it take to complete, and what are the recurring problems, can be easily identified through digital twin.”
Digital twin offers a transformation approach to planning, construction and managing critical assets. Performance audit is more important than financial audit. We need to identify the persons, who are responsible for the delay in the project and what their performance is. By evaluating their performance we can make corrective decisions, increase the speed and quality of the project, and digital twin is going to help us in that.
In a rapidly developing landscape, digital twin empowers decision makers with data driven insights, adopting sustainable practices, optimizing infrastructure performance.
Decentralization of power and division of work is very important. By digitalization methodology we can analyse the decision making process and identify the bottlenecks through performance audit of the project, thus we can decentralize the power and divide the work accordingly.
This information can be used to improve design, planning and operation of the highways.
Digital twin can be used in water systems as well to monitor the performance of dams, canals, and water treatment plants. This information can be used to prevent leakages, water wastage areas and improve efficiency. Digital twin will help in design and planning of urban housing infrastructure.
The Hon’ble Minister also released the Launch of report ‘Digital Twin Strategy for Indian Infrastructure’ at GeoSmart Infrastructure 2023 event. The report has been prepared under the aegis of the Non-Executive Think Tank on Digital Twin Strategy for Indian Infrastructure, constituted by Geospatial World.
He said, “The national digital twin strategy will create a platform for sharing data and insight of all infrastructure sector. I believe a knowledge hub should be created to make all stakeholders understand the value that digital twin will create.
“We need to reduce the cost of construction without compromising with the quality, like how can we procure the alternative material for construction. In the two upcoming projects, Delhi-Bombay highway and Ahmedabad-Dholera expressway, we are using 30 lakh ton of waste material through a simple methodology of segregating the garbage and using them. This is our contribution to a better environment practice and in addition we can reduce the cost of construction.”
