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Transition from BIM to

Digital Twin
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Introduction
• The widespread adoption of Building Information Modeling (BIM) and the
recent emergence of Internet of Things (IoT) applications offer several
new insights and decision-making capabilities throughout the life cycle of
the built environment
• The ability of real-time connectivity to online sensors deployed in an
environment has led to the emergence of the concept of the Digital Twin
of the built environment
• Digital Twins aim to achieve synchronization of the real world with a
virtual platform for seamless management and control of the
construction process, facility management, environment monitoring, and
other life cycle processes in the built environment
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Construction Projects Life Cycle

• The lifecycle of a building primarily consists of the design,
construction, operation, maintenance, and end of life stages
• each stage can be divided into superimposed information layers that
require efficient information exchange strategies
• For example, information regarding design details needs to be
exchanged between different engineering team members during the
design stage
• Another example, different stakeholders need to communicate design
and construction progress with each other during the construction
phase
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BIM evolution
• Starting from Computer-aided Design (CAD), tools for building design and
management have evolved for decades.
• Building Information Model BIM model as a 3D digital representation of
buildings, contains both geometric and semantic information of the
building elements
• Due to the sharable and consistent database, BIM makes the seamless
collaboration between AEC (architecture, engineering, and construction)
professionals possible
• BIM has been widely applied in building life cycle management, including
the design stage, construction process, as well as operating phases
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BIM examples
• detailed geometric information associated with appropriate simulations (e.g.,
energy simulation and thermal environment simulation) can help with the
design of the building and its systems
• BIM-based 4D simulations with detailed material and cost information can
similarly provide support to the construction process of building project
• 3D visualization and details of building elements provided by BIM, building
management plans can be optimized by the building manager so as to help
with the management of building equipment and the indoor environment
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IoT and BIM

• BIM itself can generally only provide static data of the built environment
and cannot update real-time information in the models automatically
without additional data sources
• the integration of real-time sensing data and the static information
provided by BIM models became possible using IOT
• Smart devices visualization and analysis of real-time environmental data
become available in BIM models using IoT
• Automated update of BIM models based on real-time building status can
be achieved using IOT
• Appropriate integration of BIM and IoT technologies can help with the
real-time monitoring of the construction process and building indoor
environment status
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Digital Twin
• The basis of the integration of BIM and IoT has led to the emergence
of the Digital Twin
• The concept of the Digital Twin originated from the aerospace field
then expanded to industrial manufacturing
• BIM-IoT integration is adapted for designing a building, monitoring,
and management of construction processes, building facilities, and
indoor environment management
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Evolution of BIM to Digital Twin in the built

environment
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Level 3, BIM and IOT integration

• Connect Building digital model with real time sensing data for building
management and environment monitoring
• Applications include:
• Construction process monitoring
• Energy performance management
• Indoor environment monitoring
• Indoor thermal comfort
• Indoor hazards
• Multi building (Community) monitoring
• Building space management
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Level 4: BIM,IOT and real time prediction

Integration
• Building Construction:
• Building Operation:
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Concepts of Ideal Digital Twin in built

environment
• Lu et al. (2019,2020): driven by UK’s need for digital framework for data infrastructure, proposed a
systematical architecture on how to develop a dynamic digital twin that integrate hetrogenious data
sources. The structure contains four levels
• Data Acquisition layer: different raw data from different sources
• Transmission layer: 5G, LP-WAN
• Data Model Integration layer: based on BIM to integrate different algorithms and simulations
• Application layer
• Alonso et al. (2019): Pursued 4 year EU founded Digital Twin project named (SPHERE) aiming to
provide integrated ICT platform for better design, construction and performance evaluation of
residential buildings
• Mohammedi & Tailor (2019): proposed game-theoretic approach aim to enable analysis of city scale
digital twin their proposed concept intend to integrate human-infrastructure and technology decision
making
• Schrotter et al. (2020): described Zurich digital twin and proposed several future actions to elevate
digital twin level
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Digital Twin Techniques in construction

• Real Time Monitoring:
• Collect data from building indoor or construction site through IoT tech using (WiFi, WSN, 5G, LP-Wan, surveillance camera …
etc.)
• Data display either on neutral platform such as computer terminal or cloud based interfaces achieving synchronous
visualization
• Real time visualization can represent information-rich view of build process or indoor environment status to building or
project manager
• Performance Prediction:
• Simulations: Construction 4D ”process”, “performance” (Energy, acoustic, Lighting and Thermal comfort predictions)
• ML techniques (ANN,SVM): prediction of status of specific targeted parameter such as occupant comfort since it require
ground truth to train models
• Decision making systems: mainly involve human in the control loop
• To make final decision on based on collected real-time data (construction progress, indoor temp, humidity)
• Stipulate insights from predicted results (energy consumption, thermal comfort)
• Make decisions based on developed Strategic scenarios results (look ahead simulations)
• Overall Digital twin integrate real time information with corresponding automated process to help decision making systems
of the management
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Digital Twin Techniques in construction Gaps

• Real Time Monitoring:
• Data lose during transfer process due to reason such as (software
incompatibility, data fading to environmental interference)
• Many IoT sensors collect the same or different environment data but their
data types are not homogenous making data analysis challenging
• Performance Prediction:
• Simulations: generally not corelated with real-time data which reduce
accuracy of predictions compared to analytics seeded with real time data
• Decision making systems:
• Usefulness of DT can significantly increase through automated decision
making and feedback loops by enabling real time automated control which
would increase the potential of analyzed scenarios adding to the reliability
and efficiency of the control system.
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Level 5: What's Next for Digital Twin

• Not only real-time visualization and prediction to support decision making,
but also support automatic feedback and control of the built environment
• In addition to the capabilities supported in Levels 1-4, the built
environment is enabled with an intelligent feedback control system that
allows it to automatically take actions based on the optimized results and
control strategies
• Can be typically achieved by exploiting related enabling technologies such
as artificial intelligence (AI) and ML algorithms
• In such Digital Twins, the virtual and real-world built environments could
interact with each other seamlessly
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Expected Features of next generation Digital

Twins
• Visualization of real-time built environment data (e.g., construction
progress, indoor temperature, humidity, occupants’ locations, and
thermal comfort)
• Predictions are based on snapshots of dynamic building information
associated with real-time data sensing to support decision making.
• Automatic control feedback with optimized management strategies to
introduce interventions in the built environment.
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Single Building
Digital Twins
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Large Scale
• Community / Neighborhood
• Additional efforts are required for example the communication between
different buildings should be well established in an efficient way so that the
whole community could share real time data and be better managed as a
whole
• Interfaces for wide variety of data sources in this scale of deployment
• City Scale: in addition to the above
• Tracking Mobility of individuals would be required as citizens commute across
the city
• Urban systems such as traffic and energy play significant role in reaching
smart city
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Examples of Level 1,2 BIM

• ArchiCAD “L1 BIM”: One of the first BIM in the market, manage and improve work flow
ArchiCAD is useful for visualization in term of aesthetic and technological aspects in both
2D,3D geometry.
• SketchUp “L1 BIM”: enables users to transform regular lines and shapes into various 3D forms
• Synchro Pro “L2 BIM”:
• Autodesk “L2 BIM”: Provide great BIM solution such as Revit and Navisworks, Revit approach
is provide models for different construction stages to boost overall coordination efforts and
simulate different project visuals. Navisworks is more of a project review solution for AEC
making itmost important in first phase of the project preconstruction to predict and control
project outcomes. Both solution have clash detection, simulation, animation, data
aggregation and other features other BIM solutions from Autodesk include (Autodesk BIM
360 for construction management and project delivery, Civil 3D focus on civil engineering but
offer some BIM features and workflows
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Examples of level 3, 4
• Kreo: USE AI to develop intelligent planning cloud based software
offering AI capabilities in it’s work. Kreo is split into Kreo Plan review
existing BIM models and attempt to fix them and Kero Design help
create BIM models from early stage.