Digital Twins and Lean Construction: Challenges for Future Practical Applications

The construction industry has experienced the opportunity to incorporate new technologies to solve problems in terms of information flow, collaboration, quality, costs, productivity, and predictability.Digital Twins (DT) can support solving some of these problems, mainly when associated with lean principles.However, there are still many gaps in the literature regarding the state of practice of DT for construction.This study investigates how current research on the integrated use of BIM-based DT and lean for construction projects has been positioned in front of practical challenges, aiming to identify research directions that support future applications in the construction phase.The research method adopted was a Systematic Literature Review (SLR).A total of 14 publications were identified and analyzed from the perspective of challenges for practical applications, considering seven aspects regarding DT application in other industries: cognitive and technical level of people, technology and infrastructure, support tools, standards, and specifications, cost control and management, cyber security and intellectual property rights, and insufficient development of DT.The results suggest that the challenges for DT implementation may become more complex due to the dynamic and unique nature of the construction site and that there is still a large field for further research on DT with lean.Finally, some future research directions are proposed.