How Bouygues Construction Drives Sustainable Building Innovation With Digital Twins

The construction industry deals with highly complex projects that involve massive 3D models, large volumes of data, and diverse data sources—from CAD models of manufacturing lines to BIM models of buildings. These models often come from different software tools, making interoperability a real challenge. Digital workflows are traditionally sequential and fragmented, limiting collaboration and slowing down the design-review process. The continuous expansion of multiple software tools with linear and fragmented workflows has become a significant barrier, hindering collaboration and slowing down design reviews. The laborious tasks of converting, adjusting, and organizing data can burden teams to the point that they need to reduce update frequencies, significantly increasing the risk of design errors and coordination failures in complex projects.

Prioritizing the safety of every individual working on Bouygues Construction sites is paramount. The company’s mission is to prevent major risks by identifying potential issues as early as possible in the project timeline. Bouygues Construction is dedicated to ensuring safe working environments that respect human rights and uphold ethical standards. Construction sites are dynamic environments, and digital tools must adapt to real-world conditions, providing more accurate simulations to support better decision-making.

To overcome these challenges, Bouygues Construction built custom digital twin applications on the NVIDIA Omniverse platform, leveraging the OpenUSD framework to unify multiple complex 3D data sources into a single, collaborative environment. With proprietary tools developed on Omniverse, Bouygues Construction can now have physics-based digital twins of its jobsites, where all participants can visualize, simulate, predict, and interact with large, multidisciplinary datasets in real time. 

Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD)—an extensible ecosystem for describing, composing, simulating, and collaborating within a 3D world—has proven especially valuable for enabling smoother real-time collaborative workflows. By merging various complex 3D data sources and applications into a unified OpenUSD environment using Omniverse, Bouygues Construction developed integrated solutions that can interact with extensive multidisciplinary datasets in real time—including buildings modeled in Revit, equipment designed in SolidWorks, and terrain imported from Cesium.

The flexibility to develop bespoke tools and workflows within the Omniverse platform—supported by the Omniverse SDK framework—has also been a key advantage. Thanks to the open and modular architecture of Omniverse, Bouygues Construction development teams were able to create custom applications tailored to specific needs. Diverse 3D data can be integrated and simulated in photorealistic virtual environments using Omniverse Kit SDK alongside RTX™-powered rendering. Bouygues Construction’s R&D and Innovation teams used Omniverse Kit to develop and prototype immersive experiences and simulate jobsite operations in physically accurate 3D environments. These Omniverse-based simulation tools are revolutionizing the way Bouygues’ construction teams plan and execute. By validating clearance dimensions virtually, teams can confidently prepare for future interventions and select the ideal equipment for any task. With NVIDIA Omniverse and PhysX® Engine, Bouygues’ simulation tools are delivering hyper-realistic physics and precision modeling for both small-scale tools and heavy-duty machinery. The result is faster decision-making, fewer on-site surprises, and optimized solutions that unlock new levels of efficiency and safety on every project.

Bouygues Construction also uses NVIDIA Isaac Sim (built on Omniverse) to generate realistic 3D training data for AI-based computer vision models—particularly for rare or hazardous scenarios that seldom occur in real life. Bouygues Construction incorporated real construction site data in AI-driven safety analysis simulations to produce photorealistic synthetic data—generated with real-time Omniverse ray tracing powered by NVIDIA RTX PRO GPUs. This method enhances AI and workforce training by providing examples difficult to capture through standard construction site data collection.

Additionally, Bouygues Construction has developed an AI-powered tool to generate high-precision 3D OpenUSD assets from 2D images. The resulting scenes deliver stunning visual fidelity, powered by real-time ray tracing in Omniverse.

Bouygues Construction endeavored to offer customers the most immersive and realistic construction simulation, to make construction safer, more sustainable, and less resource-intensive. The company now uses Omniverse to support low-carbon energy production and the development of public transport infrastructure, and it plans to design all future buildings and renovations with environmental sustainability at the forefront—creating durable structures built to last.

With NVIDIA’s comprehensive platform stack, Bouygues Construction now offers clients immersive and engaging physics-based construction phasing previews, as well as helps flag safety risks through visual simulations and AI-powered analysis. Notably, the company provides clients with a digital twin of their building or infrastructure in OpenUSD, delivering the essential “foundations” for future operations use cases.

As one of the first construction companies globally to fully embrace NVIDIA Omniverse, Bouygues Construction leads the industry’s digital transformation. The company’s use of Omniverse highlights how the platform’s features—including real-time simulation, synthetic data, and immersive virtual environments—can address longstanding construction challenges, from reducing risks to fostering cross-disciplinary collaboration—resulting in 5x improvement in data integration speed.

The results are evident across buildings, infrastructure, production lines, and equipment—each part of a unified construction of digital twins. Combined, this digital environment guides design decisions and improves risk prevention through dynamic simulations like heavy load lifting or vehicle route planning.

To accelerate construction’s digital transformation, Bouygues Construction plans to open a new innovation hub called Scale One. Scale One, a project co-financed by the French government and the Île-de-France region as part of France 2030, will leverage NVIDIA Omniverse simulations and serve as a full-scale testing ground for construction innovation. The facility includes test zones, a construction team, and storage areas designed to replicate a real-world construction site, allowing innovators to trial new materials, systems, equipment, or processes.