ASHVIN team plans the innovation strategy for the last project months.

On the 15th and 16th of June, 2023, Plan B hosted the 6th ASHVIN consortium meeting in Stockholm, Sweden. Partners gathered to share their work’s latest results and discuss the next steps towards the final project months. The focus of this final project year is to communicate, disseminate and set a plan for future exploitation of the ASHVIN Digital Twin solution, including a kit of 10 smart building tools, an IoT platform and a data visualisation platform.

To engage in real-time with its community, the project team live-tweeted the entire meeting on Twitter.

Extension

To start the meeting, the project coordinator, Professor Timo Hartmann from TUB informed that ASHVIN had obtained the requested 6-month project extension, and, thus, the project will be running until the end of March 2024. This extension enables the continuation of the data collection among several demo sites, which contributes to consolidating the ASHVIN system use cases. To support this, TUB has employed 16 students for the project.  ASHVIN’s research team will engage with these students to pursue research notably on the BuildingSmart Use Cases, connectivity of the ASHVIN system with sensors and the deployment of 4D visualisation tools.

R&I Strategy

The technical project coordinator, Rahul Tomar from DTT,  hosted the discussion on the R&I strategy. Partners agreed to continue data collection at several demonstration sites, and based on the feedback from the demonstration, DTT will work on improving the user interface of the data visualisation platform. Related to this, partners continue engaging with external construction and maintenance projects to onboard more data to the ASHVIN system; around 10 projects have already been identified as interested in joining this experiment. Based on the experiences at the demonstration sites, ASI continues leading the project’s contribution to international ICT standardisation, especially by proposing use cases for a technical committee and defining a New Work Item, both presented for a European standards organisation (ESO).

Ambitious R&I Goals

The ASHVIN project targets were settled at the start of the project, in October 2020, and in each consortium meeting, the project’s process towards objectives is monitored. Partners overviewed the status:

• Target 1: All ASHVIN tools have been deployed on at least one demonstration site. It is confirmed that all tools are running at TRL6.
• Target 2: Specified Key Performance Indicator measurements – with the demo sites, we are going in this direction. With the implementation of the ASHVIN tools at the demo sites, the KPIs are defined, and partners will estimate ASHVIN’s impact scaled with the established KPIs.
• Target 3: All kinds of data collection. It is confirmed that ASHVIN collects data from various sources, from radars to GPS data, cloud points, concrete temperature etc.
• Target 4:  The suggested standardisation contribution has been submitted to a standardisation body.  This work is well in the process, led by Austrian Standards.

In addition, partners reviewed the process of several project deliverables to be submitted in the coming months within the technical work packages. We continue sharing all public technical deliverables via our communication channels to leverage these results.

Demonstration Sites

FASADA chaired the discussions related to the 10 ASHVIN demonstration sites. One of the current focuses is to finalise a set of  BuildingSmart Use Cases showcasing the usability and usefulness of the ASHVIN system towards its different end-user groups. Moreover, 13 use cases are being developed to present each ASHVIN tool linked with industrial applications enabling the target users to understand how they could use these tools in their projects.

Also, one of the next steps is to evaluate the ASHVIN’s impact related to the demonstration sites – and evaluate the KPIs obtained from the ASHVIN application at the demo sites. Several running demonstration sites continue collecting data as well as data from around 10 construction sites will be fed into the ASHVIN platform for data analysis.

Contribution to ICT Standardisation

One of the recent outstanding outcomes of the project is that ASHVIN will present 5 use cases within a European standardisation committee. These use cases present the ASHVIN research on digital twin technologies supporting the maintenance of civil engineering assets and buildings, and these are presented at CEN TC42 Building Information Modelling (BIM) WG9 Digital Twins In Aecoo Sector. The WG will likely issue a technical report based on the use cases around October 2023.

Communication, Dissemination and Exploitation

To present the unique innovation resulting from the ASHVIN research work packages, technical partners presented five different innovation pitches, and the ASHVIN team voted for their favourite one. The winner was Irina Stipanovic from INFRAPLAN, presenting the ASHVIN work in deploying risk assessment and damage detection with digital twin technologies for better maintenance of airport infrastructure.

Dissemination of the research results will continue in scientific conferences and journals; two scientific articles are waiting for their publication, and partners will join several international conferences in the coming months.  The communication strategy continues to put forward the uniqueness of the ASHVIN solution and how its digital twin technology can solve the challenges of the European construction industry while respecting European values, policies, and regulations.

In November, DTT foresees an internal workshop for finalising the exploitation strategy for ASHVIN to define a framework for partners and business cases, enabling it to capitalize on the ASHVIN results beyond the project duration.

Mainflux will host the next and final consortium meeting in Belgrade, Serbia, in January 2024.