Engineering, architecture and consulting firm Michael Baker International launched LiveTwin on October 1 at its annual Tech Summit in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. LiveTwin is a digital twin platform and a flagship product of digitalMBI, the company’s digital innovation platform.
Built for owners, operators, public agencies and infrastructure professionals, LiveTwin has an underlying data layer that can incorporate data from building information modeling (BIM) software, geographic information systems (GIS), reality capture such as LiDAR, Internet of Things (IoT), business systems and other sources into a shared operational view of the built environment.
“Our industry doesn’t have a data creation problem. It has a data connection problem. Infrastructure information exists everywhere, but too often remains locked within disconnected systems,” said Rod Malehmir, MBI’s chief technology officer. Malehmir said LiveTwin is the first in a growing portfolio of digitalMBI solutions designed to help clients address increasingly complex infrastructure challenges, such as post-delivery asset management, primarily through MBI’s advisory business.
LiveTwin is designed to operationalize data throughout an asset’s lifecycle and, unlike some digital twins, creates a contextualized understanding of assets, operations and infrastructure systems and how they work. Customers retain ownership, control and traceability of their data, but it can be put into dashboards and other formats to give them more insight into performance with LiveTwin.
“LiveTwin creates the digital foundation that allows AI to work with this information in a reliable and meaningful way,” said Malehmir.
Railroads and large building owners are just some of the customers already using the platform to gain insights into their own operations. The platform is already in use by early adopters in more than 1,400 facilities in the US, representing more than 30 million square meters of managed space.
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