A Bibliometric and Network Analysis of Digital Twins and BIM in Water Distribution Systems

The increasing complexity of water distribution systems (WDSs) and the growing demand for sustainable infrastructure management have spurred interest in Building Information Modelling (BIM) and Digital Twin (DT) technologies. This study presents a comprehensive bibliometric and thematic literature review aiming to identify key trends, research clusters, and knowledge gaps at the intersection of BIM, DT, and WDSs. Using the Scopus database, 95 relevant publications from 2004 to 2024 were systematically analyzed. VOSviewer was applied to create, visualize, and analyze maps of countries, journals, documents, and keywords based on citation, co-citation, collaboration, and co-occurrence data. The results indicate a sharp rise in scholarly attention after 2020, with dominant contributions from European institutions. Co-authorship networks show limited global interconnectedness, suggesting that developing countries should especially prioritize integrated DT and BIM for more inclusive and diverse research partnerships. This study characterizes the state of the art and future requirements for research on the use of DT and BIM technologies in WDSs and makes a noteworthy contribution to the body of knowledge. Future research should focus on integrating DT and BIM technologies with ML, which represents scalability challenges of real-time anomaly detection integration models, advancing decision-making and operational resilience in WDNs.