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Tunnels are highly complex works of art. An average structure easily contains forty or more different installation systems, each consisting of countless components. Think of ventilation and overpressure systems to remove smoke in case of fire, signaling to direct people in the right direction, public address systems to transmit information, cameras, air quality meters, auxiliary junction boxes, lighting, as well as a series of sensors and triggers that ensure safety and flow. As a tunnel builder, how do you find out if all these systems are working properly? Finding out afterwards that things are not right is a costly business.
Soltegro has a great solution for this, which is to build a digital twin of the tunnel in which you can virtually test all systems. “You want to have all functionality tested as early as possible, so that when it's delivered you only have to connect the dots.”
For consortium De Groene Boog, there are plenty of reasons to examine the technical installations of the tunnel in a virtual environment for availability, safety and reliability. Franc Fouchier, Manager of Systems Engineering & Innovation for Soltegro: “This way, for example, you bring down the failure costs. With a tunnel you are easily seven years into the contract phase, designing, building and arranging. Things change along the way and in the test phase the system often turns out to work differently than expected. Making these changes only once the system is up and running is very costly. If you can eliminate conflicts and errors in the design phase, you save a lot of cost and effort. On top of that, as part of the consortium, croonwolters&dros also signed up for 20 years of maintenance. Systems that don't work mean delays or, after commissioning, loss of income due to reduced availability of the tunnel.”
The solution is to build a digital twin of the tunnel, in which the dynamic behavior of the hardware can be tested and simulated. Fouchier: “Normally a complete mock-up is made of a tunnel with all the installations. That is very expensive and the installations used in it are already wearing out. If you do 20 years of maintenance, you want to buy installations as late as possible. Our digital model is based on the National Tunnel Standard, conversations with suppliers and the documentation of all the hardware that is part of the tunnel design. From that we create a simulation that we link to a digital tunnel. We also created a visualization of this, so that the customer gets even more of a feel for the digital test environment.”
The key component is the operating and control system supplied by croonwolters&dros. Fouchier: “This is the heart of all the installations, ensuring that all the components that are purchased understand each other. For example, the public address system has two hundred speakers, a ventilation system sixteen fans. The camera system has 75 cameras. Testing one camera makes no sense; it's about having the right camera image come out when you need it. Or that if one fan fails, the others take over ventilation adequately. There is functional behavior behind that that is incorporated into the simulation. If it is not correct in the simulation, that could be due to the documentation or the simulation. We then adjust this until the simulation really approximates reality. In the digital twin, you can then simulate all possible scenarios, situations and calamities.”
Therefore, the digital model has great value for the consortium and the client after the tunnel is commissioned. Fouchier: “You can bet that there will be adjustments to the installations. That applies equally to the control system, where you can be sure of updates. Without having to shut down the tunnel, you can also test these changes digitally first. I compare it to Windows or iOS, for that they also have simulation programs for all the different platforms, with crash test for updates.”
Fouchier also has a mission: “At Soltegro, we support the infra world with our services in these rapidly changing digital times. In the future, Rijkswaterstaat will still have to open up closed networks for self-driving cars, for example. This will make security extra important so that hackers and other malicious parties cannot gain access. Windows has also gone from a closed system to more open. These act at lightning speed when there are problems. We need to move toward that in the infra world as well.”
