Digital Twin Framework applied to Permeable Pavements: A study case.

Permeable pavement is an effective structure to mitigate the consequences of urban development for water quality and quantity through the infiltration and detention of stormwater. Digital Twin is integrative technology that virtually represents the system through digital models, monitoring, and maintenance. This investigation conceptualized and applied a DT for the monitoring and modeling five different types of permeable pavement constructed in a parking lot. The pavements temperature, rainfall, outflow, and the number of cars in each parking lot were monitored at the physical entity. The data were transmitted using the MQTT protocol with a mix of 4G LTS connection and Wi-Fi extended for all ESP32 responsible for sending the data. A Raspberry Pi 4 was used for the Services Entity with Node-Red as an MQTT broker for local data storage and visualization through an interactive dashboard. A SQL server was used to store the data online to be retrieved by the Digital Entity (DE). The DE comprises a physically based distributed 2D model for runoff and a 1D model for infiltration developed in MATLAB. The developed DT enhanced the data monitoring, transmission, storage, and modeling of the different permeable pavements through the interactivity between all entities. The DT aids with maintenance schedule and enhances the calibration of the model parameters using the high-resolution collected data.