Estonia developing a national digital twin to increase construction productivity

Estonia is well known as one of the most digital countries in Europe.  At the GEOBIM 2020 conference this morning Christopher-Robin Raitviir, of the Estonian Department of Digital Construction in the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications, described how Estonia is adopting a BIM-based building permit process which is contributing to the development of a  national 3D digital twin.  The business objective behind these initiatives is to improve construction productivity by a factor of three.

The objective of the digital permitting process is to speed up permitting and raise the level of compliance enforced by the process. The digital permitting application accepts BIM models in IFC format and then applies rule-based and algorithm-based checks to ensure compliance with national standards.  For example, a standard for door size can be checked automatically and any doors that are not compliant are highlighted in red and identified and visualized in the 3D model making it easy to identify and correct problematic doors.  After permitting approval building designs are deposited in the National Building Registry.  This is interesting because it addresses a widespread problem; what to do with designs after the permit has been issued.  The designs have been submitted as part of a building permit application and have been publicly available for a period of time.  They contain important information that can be very useful for emergency responders and for other purposes.  The designs are often left to molder away in the basements of municipal governments because of uncertainty about ownership - even though the designs have been publicly available during the permitting process, access after permitting is often restricted because the information is considered to be proprietary.  Currently the models in the National Building Registry are designs, but the ultimate goal is for it to contain accurate as-builts.

The Estonian National Digital Twin was initiated in 2018 and includes buildings, roads and other transportation infrastructure such as rail and airports, and, remarkably, underground utility networks.  This data is publicly available and buildings, transportation links and utility networks can be selected for download in CityGML and other formats.

This is a remarkable initiative on a national scale and is similar in many ways to Singapore which has had a sustained effort to improve the speed and comprehensiveness of the permitting process by requiring digital BIM models.