Cybersecurity of Digital Twins in the Built Environment

Abstract

Smart cities and digital twins promise to provide fully integrated and networked connectivity between virtual/digital assets and physical build¬ing/infrastructure assets to form digital economies. However, industrial espionage, cyber-crime and deplorable politically driven cyber-interventions threaten to disrupt and/or physically damage the critical infrastructure that supports national wealth generation and preserves the health, safety and welfare of the populous. The purpose of this presentation is to present a comprehensive review of cyber-threats confronting critical infrastructure asset management reliant upon a digital twins, common data environment (CDE) to augment building information modelling (BIM) implementation. BIM is expounded to provide newfound efficiency and productivity for the Architecture, Engineering, Construction and Operations (AECO) sector throughout the building life cycle. Presently the AECO sector is witnessing an unprecedented pace of digitalization of built assets much of which is reliant upon cloud-based systems to provide access to data-rich 3D representations of physical built assets.