Dassault Systèmes Participates in IoT Landmark Smart Office Building Project

IoT has been in the news in recent years, with experts have predicting the future of smart homes and cities. The transformational power of the Internet of Things will extend its connectivity and responsiveness to offices and residential spaces and into their futures.

Dassault Systèmes has just participated in a landmark smart office building pilot project in cooperation with Rhomberg Group, Zumtobel Group, Bosch Software Innovations, and Modcam AB at the LifeCycle Tower ONE (LCT) building in Dornbirn, Austria, utilizing their vast experience in the aerospace and automotive industries for architecture and urban planning. Equipped with automated lighting fixtures and a smart control system, the building is able to adjust to high standards of both sustainability and user comfort. Dassault Systèmes’ 3DEXPERIENCE platform, which collects and analyzes the smart office’s sensor information, enables users to –

• Monitor real-time updates on the building’s technical health
• Optimize energy usage and savings per luminaire, per floor or for the entire building
• Use 3D visualizations of presence data and occupancy heat maps to customize and adapt energy usage

Ingeborg Rocker, vice president of 3D Experience City at Dassault Systemes, spoke with AECCafe about this exciting new endeavor. According to Rocker, Rhomberg thinks the building industry needs to be looking at the large world population and our diminishing natural resources in terms of building, going forward. Sand prices have skyrocketed, thus it would be better to use less concrete. Mr. Rhomberg wants to use it only for decks and towers, and is re-engineering how wood can be used instead. His patented technique enables him to build up to 30-floor high wood structures with concrete floors but that are otherwise made out of wood.

Rhomberg is also interested in looking at how can you optimize the daily management and operations of the building. Dassault has been involved in this aspect of the project, but is involved from the beginning in the next building project. Rhomberg and Bosch took data from sensors, real time data that they accumulated on their platform. The modern LCT ONE, owned by Rhomberg Group and equipped with a state-of-the-art Zumtobel lighting solution and smart controls system, is ideal to turn into an innovative connected building, targeting sustainability and user comfort.

“In this case we look at the optimization of energy uses by looking at light systems of the building, and the Zumtobel Group is the leader here,” said Rocker. “Modcam AB addresses motion detection to define what kind of occupancy occurs in rooms and therefore, interactively enables limiting the lighting if nobody is in the room.”

Dassault has put together what they call the Virtual Twin – whereby even before the building is built, “you have specs of what building should be like, you’re starting to design but not as you traditionally do in architecture software, that is save it to a file,” said Rocker. “In our case, we’re saving it to a data model directly. As different people can collaborate jointly on the model, you can continue to work on it, but you also see what the lighting engineer does while you’re designing the wall. This way many versions can be viewed and it’s a much better collaboration, where conflicts are immediately seen and can be discussed among the peers that are working together.”

The next step in the Virtual Twin is not just to make the design, but to build the system of systems.  In this case it would be the entire electric circuit of the building, and  within the Virtual Twin to assess what the energy consumption would be. You can look at different pictures of that sum total and play them to see what different consequences would be. You can see lighting options within the building before you start building it.

The entire construction in this case is prefabricated and can be simulated with Dassault software, so you can see step by step how the process can occur or be optimized. It took 30 days, not including the foundation, for the LCT ONE building to be essentially built.

“We’re looking at the actual usage through the inhabitants of the building and understanding what data is coming in through the lenses that have sensors,” said Rocker.  “We feed this data back into what we have as a virtual model. You can look at what is going well and what is not going so well and you can analyze that and plan to build multiples of these buildings and update the specifications for these buildings. These are all built on standardized modules that we can then update. We can optimize the process of building but also optimize the experience of inhabiting the building.”

Why is IoT so interesting to us? asks Rocker. “The Internet of Things is objects that can be serviced. You can send information to the object, and as you do this, you can update the behavior of the object, and certain characteristics of the object. You may not want someone programming a new idea of the service of how the object could operate, but you would like to test first what that would mean for the overall system. Simulate before you implement the service, and simulate the very service you have in mind, in the Virtual Twin, before you create it and let it be run in the real world.”

Once the building exists, all sensor data is coming in, and you really see what the building’s life is like, what the action on the floor in the building is every minute. You can troubleshoot again by looking at the Virtual Twin and solve the problem with more efficiency.

The Virtual Twin works with Dassault’s standard tools. Dassault is using its assets from the mechanical and engineering industries and interpreting them towards the design of buildings. The Virtual Twin will not only be evident in design but also in operations. The two are linked intrinsically in an entire virtual lifecycle of the building.

With the new lighting, the light may dim because it is motion sensored, and no one in the room is moving, so if you move your arm a bit the light will come back on.

This is addressing when do you really need lighting? “We have a parallel project going on in a factory where they expect by looking at energy consumption to decrease the amount of money they spend on energy by $1-2 million per year,” said Rocker.  “If we optimize that and monitor consumption appropriately, that’s a lot of money if you have 250 factories.”

Tags: 3D, 3D cities, AEC, architects, architecture, BIM, building, building information modeling, CAD, Dassault Systemes, Internet of Things, IoT

Categories: 2D, 3D, apps, architecture, building information modeling, construction, Dassault Systemes, engineering, file sharing, infrastructure

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