‘Digital twin’ tests future Schinkelbrug controls

Four large screens display a mosaic of camera views of the Schinkelbrug. Only when we get closer can we see that these are not views from a real camera – they are highly accurate digital simulations of the bridges and surrounding environment. ‘We’ve replicated the behaviour of the bridges in a game environment’, explains Bilal Akdeniz. As the Schinkelcomplex coordinator for the TriAX construction consortium (Besix, Dura Vermeer and Heijmans), he is closely involved in building the ‘digital twin’, the digital model of the future Schinkelbrug. ‘Widening the Schinkelbrug will have numerous consequences for how it’s controlled: it will be completely different. A digitally replicated environment like this gives us the opportunity to test the technology now.’

We are inside the TriAX construction consortium’s testing unit on the construction site alongside the A4 and A10 West. In addition to the control system, other technical aspects of the future Schinkelbrug bridge are also being extensively tested here – including ways of ensuring that the noise nuisance caused in the area around the bridge can be reduced to a minimum. Inside the building is a small hut – around 2 x 5 m in size – in which we find the digital twin. The bridge operators from Waternet will not switch over to the new control system until late in 2027, but they have already had several training sessions in the testing unit. Akdeniz: ‘This means that the operators still have a chance to say: this doesn’t work properly or we’d like that to be different. If we decide to adjust something at this stage, it costs much less than if it’s already been built.’

In order to widen the A10 Zuid, we are also widening the Schinkelbrug. It currently consists of five movable bridges, but there will be eight in the future. To create space for the new bridges, we already demolished the control towers on both sides of the bridge, and moved the controls to a temporary hut next to the Nieuwe Meer lock building. ‘The operators have already become accustomed to controlling the bridge from a distance rather than by eye from the towers’, says Akdeniz. ‘But as things currently stand, all of the bridges have to be opened and closed again one by one. As you can imagine, that would be very time-consuming and inefficient with eight bridges. This is why we’re moving over to clusters: in the future, the bridges will be operated in twos or threes, which means there will be four clusters. You then have just four procedures rather than eight.’

With the digital control system, the operators are not only practising how to open and close the bridges in clusters in the future. An important component of the process of testing the technology involves training for all kinds of emergencies. ‘For example, what you do if the bridges are open and a ship comes to a standstill? Akdeniz’ fingers slide across the keyboard of one of the computers and the simulated camera images suddenly turn dark. Some of the cameras appear to have become fogged. ‘What will you do if there’s thick fog in the middle of the night or lots of rain, as you can see here? We’ve integrated all these scenarios, making it possible to train for them. It will ensure that we’re prepared on every front.’