A Digital Twin Platform for Energy Efficient and Smart Buildings Applications

Abstract

The employment of digital technologies is essential for creating new comfort levels, security, smartness, and efficiency in buildings. Buildings will shift from being a static, reactive element in the energy sector to being a proactive important component with the capacity to intelligently adapt to changes in the dynamic environment and interact efficiently with other structures and networks in smart communities and grids by possessing an array of sensors and meters everywhere, as well as a vast database of digital information. To capitalize on the benefits of building sector digitization and respond to rising demands for energy efficiency, comfort, and safety, we propose merging historical, real-world, and forecast data into a context information model to characterize and better comprehend the building. This is accomplished by digitally representing real-world assets as Digital Twins, enabling for integrated data-driven decision making across the building life cycle. The proposed holistic Digital Twin platform ‘Twin4Build’ substitutes the conventional static Building Information Model with a living deployable model that combines dynamic energy models and real-time data to provide a variety of operational services such as gathering and handling data, real-time performance monitoring and analysis, continuous commissioning, and strategic planning.