Digital Twins (DTs) are forecasted to be used in two-thirds of large industrial companies in the next decade. In the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) sector, their actual application is still largely at the prototype stage. Industry and academia are currently reconciling many competing definitions and unclear processes for developing DTs. There is a compelling need to establish DTs as practice in AEC by developing common procedures and standards tailored to the sector's procedures and use cases. This paper proposes a step-by-step workflow process for developing a DT for an existing asset in the built environment, providing a proof-of-concept case study based on the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol (UK). To achieve its aim, this paper (i) reviews the state-of-the-art of DTs in Civil Engineering, (ii) proposes a working DT-based workflow framework for the built environment applicable to existing assets, (iii) applies the framework and develops of the physical-virtual architecture to a case study of bridge management, and finally (iv) discusses insights from the application. The main novelty lies in the development of a versatile methodological framework that can be applied to the broad context of civil infrastructure. This paper's importance resides in the knowledge challenge, value proposition and operation dictated by developing a DT workflow for the built environment, which ultimately represents a relevant use case for the digital transformation of national infrastructure.@en

Digitalisation and the Internet of Things (IoT) help city councils improve services, increase productivity and reduce costs. City-scale monitoring of traffic and pollution enables the development of insights into low-air quality areas and the introduction of improvements. IoT provides a platform for the intelligent interconnection of everyday objects and has become an integral part of a citizen's life. Anyone can monitor from their fitness to the air quality of their immediate environment using everyday technologies. With caveats around privacy and accuracy, such data could even complement those collected by authorities at city-scale, for validating or improving policies. The authors explore the hierarchies of urban sensing from citizen-to city-scale, how sensing at different levels may be interlinked, and the challenges of managing the urban IoT. The authors provide examples from the UK, map the data generation processes across levels of urban hierarchies and discuss the role of emerging sociotechnical urban sensing infrastructures, that is, independent, open, and transparent capabilities that facilitate stakeholder engagement and collection and curation of grassroots data. The authors discuss how such capabilities can become a conduit for the alignment of community- and city-level action via an example of tracking the use of shared electric bicycles in Bristol, UK.@en