The third plenary session at GeoSmart India 2023 was held on the topic of the Digital Twin Strategy for Indian infrastructure. The panel featured experts from the geospatial industry who discussed the need for a strategy focusing on the national digital twin.
The session was moderated by Ananya Narain, VP-Commercial Consulting, Geospatial World. Kai Umino, President, Topcon Asia emphasized the key trends in the industry, data standardization, and technology adoption to catalyze the Digital Twin Strategy.
While talking about the key trends, which is the indication of software and hardware, value proposition, Kai said capturing on-field real-time data is paramount.
“Data standardization is very crucial. Eventually it could be optimised. However, we want to boost the technology adoption while making it cheaper which will also help in making the data,” Kai said.
Shedding light on the challenges that are proving to be a barrier for a national Digital Twin, Kaushik Chakraborty, Senior VP, APAC, Bentley Systems said, “One of the biggest challenges in the engineering world is where do you begin? Then comes what is the most effective way to design something? The initial cost and CAPEX requirement is very high.”
“So how does one bring efficiency? Here comes Infrastructure intelligence which is about unlocking the key information data during the design phase, which is difficult to find,” he added.
PV Rajasekhar, Additional Survey, Eastern Zone Survey of India talking about the Continuously Operation Reference Station (CORS) network said, “The first thing is setting up of CORS network. We have been successfully able to setup sufficient number of continuously operation reference station networks throughout India, which would enable you to get the horizontal coordinates of any part of the country.”
“The other thing is providing a digital innovation mode for the industry to follow. There are no technological issues in this but financing as well as prioritization issue as to which area should get the supply first still remain prevalent,” Rajasekhar said.
According to Rajasekhar, to make a digital twin a reality, we need to have a platform where different information from sensors can be analysed and actionable actions can be derived from that. It is a work in progress.
“We are trying to bring in the way and approaches the way we see the construction sector. So much of the infra in the country is running with Siemens devices. We work on a lot of critical infra such as trains, railways, highways etc. The more we do that and approach them with a digital transformation in our daily lives, in 2 year we can reach the golden standard of best construction business practices,” said Amal Jaiswal, Head – Digital Business Enterprise, Siemens.
