How airports are leveraging data-rich digital twins to modernize operations

DFW (Dallas Fort Worth) Airport have been experimenting with our integration tool. By linking up CMMS (computerized maintenance management systems, BAS (building automation systems) and BMS (building management systems) they’ve been able to evolve their digital twins from Descriptive to Informative. As a result, they’ve been realizing the business benefits of having near-real-time and historical operational data at their fingertips.

DFW Airport: Effectively running an airport that has 80 million passengers passing through

As the third largest airport in the world, it’s critical that the team at DFW is aware of issues as soon as possible—in order to resolve them quickly and minimize disruption.
To learn more about how their digital transformation journey has supported this operational goal, we spoke to Robert Lee Brown, the Senior Project Controls System Manager at DFW Airport.

Adopting digital twin technology

He admitted that prior to 2011, technology wasn’t a main focus within DFW’s construction design process. But fast forward a few years, they’re now innovators: “2017 is when we started our digital twin journey. The product that was produced showed my executive leadership that this is something we might want to pursue. Because what was produced—from a visual aspect—they were able to understand.”

By having an accurate 3D digital replica of DFW airport in Autodesk Tandem, data that was previously only reviewed in Gannt charts and tables, now had more context to it—making it far easier to interpret.

Developing an informative twin

With this data-rich digital twin at their disposal, Robert and his team decided to take things further with our add-on service, Tandem Connect. He explained: “If we’re moving beyond the realm of just a 3D model, I need informed data that’s going to allow us to make decisions.”

With its extensive library of vendor-agnostic plugins, Tandem Connect (in beta at the time) made this possible for Robert and the team. He explained exactly what these integrations meant for the airport: “If you have information from your CMMS, from your BAS and things like that—and parameters into your models that have associations with those integrations—now you can have dashboards and things that show some data where leadership, maintenance providers, and vendors can make decisions. You can get from a reactive type of maintenance and operations to more predictive. And that’s where we want to go.”

Tandem Connect’s low-code environment for authoring data pipelines enables a node-based interface with drag and drop functionality. For the most popular IT/OT systems, you can get them connected without a developer’s support.

We asked Robert how he found his experience of using it: “As far as just the integration part of Tandem Connect, it’s so easy to bring data in from various systems because of its visual programming. I think most people with just basic BIM and a little bit of “want to” can use Tandem Connect.”