Seminar Series: Dr. Timo Hartmann on the ASHVIN Project

College Station, TX-

Timo Hartmann, Ph.D., visited Texas A&M University on November 3rd to present his work on “ASHVIN Project – Assistants for Healthy, Safe, and Productive Virtual Construction Design, Operation & Maintenance Using a Digital Twin,” to Civil Engineering Graduate Students. The graduate seminar, Structures, Geotechnical and Construction Division is instructed by Dr. Zenon Medina-Cetina, Associate Professor in the Zachry Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Texas A&M University. This seminar was facilitated by Stephanie Paal, Ph.D., an Associate Professor in the Zachry Department and a Williams Brothers Construction Company Associate Professor.

Dr. Hartmann has always been intrigued by the working processes of construction, engineering, and architectural professionals and how they design the complex engineering systems that keep our societies ticking, moving, and thriving. While he is in awe of how engineers deal with the complexity of their designs, he tries to provide managerial and technical solutions that improve how they work. He believes in the digitalization of the industry in the sense that computational tools have the potential to allow engineers to design significantly different than they were able before – individually, but more importantly together in integrated engineering efforts. To develop such tools, it is important to consider both technical and social factors working in close collaboration with practitioners.

Hartmann received a Ph.D. from Stanford University where he was a student at the CIFE – Center for Integrated Facility Engineering. His work has been published in Advanced Engineering Informatics, the Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, Building Research and Information, Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering, Design Studies, or ITCON. He is the handling editor of Advanced Engineering Informatics where they explore the science of engineering knowledge formulation with computational methods and Engineering, Construction, and Architectural Management where we would like to explore how to best manage collaborative and integrated engineering projects.

ASHVIN Projectis a large-scale EU funded project (€5,609,858.75) that aims at enabling the European construction industry to significantly improve its productivity, while reducing costs and ensuring absolutely safe working conditions. To this end, Ashvin provides a proposal for a European wide digital twin standard, an open-source digital twin platform integrating IoT and image technologies, and a set of tools and demonstrated procedures to apply the platform and the standard proven to guarantee specified productivity, cost, and safety improvements.

The envisioned platform provides a digital representation of the construction product at hand and allows to collect real-time digital data before, during, and after production of the product to continuously monitor changes in the environment and within the production process. Based on the platform, Ashvin develops and demonstrates applications that use the digital twin data. These applications will allow it to fully leverage the potential of the IoT based digital twin platform to reach the expected impacts (better scheduling forecast by 20%; better allocation of resources and optimization of equipment usage; reduced number of accidents; reduction of construction projects).

The Ashvin solutions can overcome worker protection and privacy issues that come with the tracking of construction activities, provide means to fuse video data and sensor data, integrate geo-monitoring data, provide multi-physics simulation methods for digital representing the behavior of a product (not only its shape), provide evidence based engineering methods to design for productivity and safety, provide 4D simulation and visualization methods of construction processes, and develop a lean planning process supported by real-time data.*

*Bio and Abstract provided by Dr. Timo Hartmann