Helping Denver International Airport plan for a bigger, bolder future with their own digital twin
Denver International Airport (DEN) thinks big. Covering 53 square miles, the airport is larger than the island of Manhattan and is designed with growth in mind. When it was built it could accommodate about 50 million passengers a year. Today, more than 82 million people pass through DEN annually.
To meet this rapid rise in flow, the airport launched Vision 100, a multi-year expansion program designed to prepare DEN to accommodate up to 100 million passengers. The scope is huge, with 43 new gates, a complete overhaul of the Great Hall, and improvements to the airport’s most congested areas, while keeping the airport fully operational, 24/7.
A task too big to work in silos
Large infrastructure projects are nothing new to airports, but Vision 100 pushed Denver into a new category of complexity. At any given time, close to 100 contractors and hundreds of subcontractors are working across the site, with thousands of people contributing to design, construction, and operations. Without the right systems in place, this kind of work can create an overload of informational and process silos, with hundreds of disconnected files, isolated workstreams, and manual handoffs between teams.
When working at the scale required for an airport like Denver, those silos can quickly become unmanageable and an unsustainable burden on the project.
Airport operators needed a way to connect design, construction, and facilities data into a single source of truth, which could evolve to accommodate the sheer size and scale the airport requires.
“We had close to 100 different contractors working with thousands of individual members at any given time. It takes powerful technical tools to bring all of this together.”
Brendan Dillon, Director of Digital Facilities and Infrastructure at Denver International Airport
Turning models into connected, insight-rich twins
As the concourse expansion began to take shape, the choice was made to unify project modeling practices with existing facility models in a shared core design software. Hundreds of designers, engineers, and contractors can collaborate in a shared cloud environment. This living digital twin shows how the entire facility is operating and changing.
Using Autodesk Tandem, the digital twin combines hundreds of individual models into a single shared environment to view and coordinate activities across multiple mechanical, electrical, HVAC, and structural systems simultaneously. This provides a navigable, spatially accurate representation of the airport that helps teams understand how systems interact in the real world.
“It’s not just about: ‘here’s the data on the screen,’ it becomes a real place that tells a story.”
Brendan Dillon, Director of Digital Facilities and Infrastructure at Denver International Airport
With so many parallel workstreams underway, coordination is key. By centralizing models in the cloud, teams can collaborate in near-real time, identify conflicts earlier, and reduce the need for costly rework. Changes made during design or construction are easier to track and validate against the broader context of the airport.
This approach has delivered fewer delays, better coordination, and construction has stayed on schedule without disrupting daily airport operations. For an airport where every second of downtime represents a financial loss, that reliability has been hugely impactful.
The digital twin doesn’t stop being useful once construction is complete, either. It serves as a foundation for decisions about ongoing operations and maintenance, giving facility teams better visibility into assets, systems, and spaces across the airport.
Designing for what comes next
Airports are long-term investments, and DEN is planning decades ahead. The complexity of its systems will only increase with higher passenger volumes, developed sustainability goals, and new technologies.
“The complexity in our projects is not something that’s going to go away. If anything, it’s going to keep increasing.”
Brendan Dillon, Director of Digital Facilities and Infrastructure at Denver International Airport
By adopting a connected digital twin now, Denver International Airport is setting itself up to adapt. The digital twin provides a repeatable framework that can flex with future changes in layout, scope, and systems, without having to start from scratch.
A blueprint for modern infrastructure
Denver International Airport’s Vision 100 program proves that even the most complex infrastructure can grow in smarter ways, without just throwing more resources and investment at the project.
By connecting data and project teams, Autodesk Tandem is helping change how large facilities are planned, built, and operated. The airport stays open, passengers keep moving, while behind the scenes, Denver’s digital twin gets it ready for the next 100 million journeys.
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