BUILT CoLAB has been collaborating with FEUP on the development of a Digital Twins platform dedicated to the structural monitoring and management of historic monuments.
This platform is based on the BIM model of the infrastructure to be analysed, providing access to all the information contained within that model and, in addition, enabling the monitoring of all data recorded by sensors installed on that infrastructure.
This collaboration began during the completion of a master’s thesis on the business environment, carried out in 2024 at BUILT CoLAB by Emanuel Ferreira, then a student at FEUP, who, under the supervision of António Arêde and João Poças Martins at FEUP, developed a 3D model visualiser that integrated sensor data using open-source components.
This initial work enabled the digital model of São Bento Station to be integrated into the platform, and two further landmarks in the city of Porto have recently been added: the Obelisk at the Boavista Roundabout and the Church of Santo António dos Congregados.
This final phase involved the collaboration of another former student and current researcher at FEUP, João Pinto, under the supervision of António Arêde and José Miguel Castro, and also enabled various components of the platform to be refined and the range of available features to be expanded.
The current version of the platform is the result of a project carried out by FEUP in support of Metro do Porto, under the supervision of António Arêde, to continuously monitor the structural behaviour of the historic buildings in question during the construction of the new Pink Line, and is being continued as part of another ongoing project by the ICS – the Institute for Sustainable Construction Association, also in support of Metro do Porto, for the analysis, interpretation and management of monitoring results for these sensitive historic buildings.
This collaboration will continue shortly as part of a new master’s thesis project within the BUILT CoLAB, which will aim to incorporate data from a fourth monument into the platform, as well as to integrate features capable of assessing structural information using other computational tools, thereby complementing the monitoring and analysis of the data collected by the sensors.
