Hosting the Olympics is not all sunshine and rainbows; Paris has had to face a whole slew of problems with the 2024 Olympics, the least of which was making spaces around the Eifel Tower safer and more commutable for tourists.
There is more for Paris to gain from re-engineering the city than cosmetic improvements: newly renewed infrastructure will make for an anti-fragile city that is adaptable to floods and other calamities – which are only expected to increase in frequency due to climate change. Innovative technologies and solutions like BIM Modeling, Digital Twins, and Prototype Developing have been used to drive this change.
Such solutions are also the driving forces behind Industry 4.0 and the Digitization of Plants and Factories. Let us examine the three innovations mentioned above, and see how the technologies used for and during the Olympics empower the Industrial sector in streamlining its processes.
Digital Twins Enable Efficient Planning
Digital Twins are connected, safe, and technologically enabled digital replicas of real-world structures, like buildings, stadiums, or even entire cities. Digital twins of the projects are created to replicate their coordinated operation and usefulness in real time, to obtain important insights into performance and profitability prior to construction. They are developed using novel technologies like VDC Modeling and BIM modeling.
Digital Twin models have also opened doors to efficient planning in the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris. As an example, real-time monitoring of Paris 2024’s energy usage will be gathered and utilized to guide smart city modeling: the digital twins of locations communicate information like where power is needed, where cameras are to be placed, and where accessibility problems frequently occur, all without having to constantly visit the location.
Spatial Mapping Solutions like Digital Twins are also empowering the Digital Transformation of plants. Digital Twins promise rich models connecting the actual and digital worlds of plants and processes, creating quantifiable measurements of unpredictability. These interactive metrics can be studied using cutting-edge and sophisticated algorithms for offline analyses and real-time predictive feedback. These make it possible to make significant design and process improvements that were not possible before the emergence of Industry 4.0 systems and methodologies.
BIM Supports Detailed Simulations and Collaboration
Building Information Modeling or BIM was used to model the Eifel Tower and the surrounding area to simulate the structural integrity of buildings, underground facilities, and the movement of people. These simulations then used computational fluid dynamics [CFD] analysis to account for the movement of aerosols and toxic materials, thereby supporting the development of a safe and easily maneuverable tourist eco-system.
As the renovation project was of a huge scale, a great deal of collaboration and coordination between different functions across the globe was required; deploying BIM proved to be the perfect solution as it provides a Common Data Environment (CDE) to maintain complex schedules and budgets. Additionally, these visualizations were also used to receive feedback from Parisians, ensuring complete transparency throughout the project’s development.
Plant Digitization techniques leverage similar 2D and 3D modeling systems such as laser-based scanning (LiDAR) to capture all information relevant to the factory life cycle with millimeter accuracy. This helps factories and plants get real-time insights from sophisticated analytical tools like artificial intelligence and machine learning, enabling them to optimize workflows, increase production efficiency, and reduce operating expenses.
Protoyping for Resilient Systems and Processes
Events like the Olympics offer myriad ways to innovate existing systems. One method for sustained innovation is prototyping. In the case of the 2024 Olympics, the team prototyped drones that provide real-time visualizations of areas using radar and radio frequencies to aid in scouting for potential risks and blockers to the seamless functioning of events.
Industry 4.0 methodologies support similar prototyping, with a sustained design efficiency to boot! For example, services like parametric modeling can be used to shape multiple geometric models by simply modifying values of certain parameters, which results in flexile 3D Models that help relevant stakeholders visualize factory prototypes better. This leads to quick project turnarounds and the development of systems that are optimized and clash-conflict resilient.
Conclusion
The outcomes of BIM and Digital Twins are more extensive than one might presume. They will not only repair the gardens and roads around the Eifel Tower but will also affect the traffic in the streets, the structural integrity of nearby buildings, and more – all done to ease up commutability blockers around the region and make the area resilient to natural disasters like floods.
Similarly, the applicability of these innovations in Industry 4.0 is unsuspectingly vast and their results are profound. They support a plethora of industries like Oil & Gas, Defense, Pharmaceuticals, and more to not only optimize functions but to develop systems that can effectively handle conflicts and clashes, are environmentally sustainable, and designed to be seamlessly integrated with other emerging technologies.
