What is Meant by Digital Twins for Intelligent Buildings?

A webinar featuring Invicara, Cityzenith and Intelligent Buildings entitled “Smart Building Digital Twins – Demystifying the Building Visualization Technology” shed light on Smart Building Digital Twins and what that actually means.

For starters, Invicara’s Digital Twins bring together the critical building information you need to make your properties run smoother, satisfy tenants and lower your operating costs. Offered are a unique mix of consulting, technology and implementation services –

• An Asset Twin – a rich information model of your building that associates 3D graphics to all relevant data and documents you need to manage your property.
• Intelligent Building Diagnostics – as you can solve problems quickly and efficiently with minimal disruption to tenants
• 360^o degree view of asset performance – giving you insights to reduce energy and maintenance costs, enhance asset life, and optimize capital planning for building systems.

Based on projects around the globe, Invicara has identified five levels of Digital Twin maturity

invicara.com/digital-twin-maturity

Cityzenith reports that there is no single software platform that meets the diverse needs of the smart city.

By definition, Digital Twins are 3D virtual replicas of buildings, infrastructure and other physical assets connected to the data and around them. Digital Twins are used primarily to optimize performance and predict and visualize future outcomes across functional areas in cities like maintenance, energy consumption, space utilization traffic management and public safety.

Cityzenith’s 3D digital twin platform SmartWorldPro is pioneering the development and implementation of Digital Twins in Smart Cities around the world. The platform’s unique advantage and goal is that it aggregates software tools and data and integrates solutions across the entire lifecycle of a city from design and construction through operations and tenancy.

Tom Shircliff, Intelligent Buildings, was the moderator for the event.

Marty Chobot, Invicara spoke about the various aspects of their digital twin technology.

The Key to Delivering Value with Digital Twins: Strategy and Data

What is a digital twin? Is a question often asked.

• Starts as an Asset Twin – a rich information model about the building
• Becomes the single source of truth for facility data – to all other business systems that need it.
• Integrating data from other business systems to become the Performance Twin: a data hub and building dashboard.
• Enables development of custom solutions.
• 360^o degree view of asset performance

Problem: how can I optimize asset performance?

Example: 80% of a pump’s lifecycle cost is maintenance and energy

Solution:

• Integrate inspection data, trend pump’s amperage
• Integrate with asset or maintenance management systems for repair history and cost
• Integrate with building automation system/IoT for performance data, vibration and predict maintenance

Value:

• Reduce energy & Maintenance costs
• Enhance asset life, maximize value
• Optimize capital planning for building systems

Intelligent Building Diagnostics

Problem: How can I solve issues efficiently?

Example – room is cold

Solution:

• Visualize mechanical systems related to the room.
• Pull up the recipe to enable remote diagnostics
• Compare expected performance to live data from BMS/IoT. Get contextual information to find and fix the problem

Value:

• Data drive decisions to reduce costs and time.
• Improve tenant satisfaction
• Institutionalize building knowledge.

Michael Jansen, Cityzenith asks the questions:

• How do we measure success during the initial pilot?
• Does this platform fulfill our clients brief?
• ROA: Are CBRE able to remove the disparate number of software applications aggregate all of the data being collected into costs savings for our client?
• ROI: Can this then help inform on Service Charge budgets year after year?
• Data/Software integrations: what type of data bases would you like to connect, manufacture or import? What type of operational software, IoT sensors or 3rd party analytics tools would you like to connect to Smart World Pro via APIs?

Building Management System – Trend 963 System

• ANPR cameras and a common internal CCTV system
• Elogbooks and P2P are frequently used by the onsite BM
• TRAMPS, a property management database used by CBRE
• Tenet management system TBD
• Vendor/engineering consultant/maintenance contractor management system

Conclusions

1. ROA/ROI models are needed as an adjunct to any DT project in order to deliver operational value to clients.
2. FDT ROI models calculate asset utilization and performance, capital costs, asset-related operating costs ultimately, demonstrating the potential for a longer asset lifecycle for clients.
3. Early analysis suggests owners can achieve a 15-25% reduction in variable operating costs for office buildings through predictive maintenance, improved visits for facility management, energy optimization, algorithms, etc.
4. An additional opportunity to improve occupant retention for office and industrial assets of 10-15%, through more timely processing of occupant requests, space utilization, use patterns, occupant growth and performance of facility managers.
5. Ultimately a Digital Twin solution for this project has the potential to generate a reduction in operating costs by up to 88 cents per square foot per annum.

Matthew Lennan, Oxford Properties offers a definition of Digital Twins:

• Database describing the building in increasingly accurate detail
• Simplified visualization with device alert monitoring
• Digital object to interact over internet with cyber security, services, tenants etc.
• Location awareness for devices and people
• A long term history of activity in the building including
• BMS set points
• Electrical Draw
• Lighting conditions
• Security
• Elevator use

BIM Advantages:

• Tight coordination between construction trades
• Widely accepted and implemented industry practice
• Must be supplemented with operating manuals and standard procedures

Digital Twin Advantages:

• Can be used by non-CAD specialists
• Easy to input (e.g. spreadsheets)
• Does not need to be as accurate
• Provides much more detail on devices within the building
• Digital experience- brings buildings ‘online’
• Basis for future automation

What are some real uses for Digital Twins?

Building Design

• modeling of operating conditions
• Communicates Digital Workflows

Efficient Operations

• Energy consumption
• Hot/cold call troubleshooting aid
• Predictive maintenance

Building construction

• Coordination between Vendors (even those not on BIM)
• Reduced cost for control systems

Property and Asset Management

• Shared view of the property

Coordination on Tenant activities

• elevator booking; loading dock

Integrated Visualization with Data Sets

• Graphic modeling helps orient:
• Troubleshooting visualization for hidden devices
• Intuitive systems controls (e.g.: Lighting zones)

Performance Based Data Sets:

• Increasing use of analytics
• Better predictive for operations
• Detailed traffic patterns (retail)
• Increased use of ML to optimize Operations
• Increased use of AI to provide insights to Customer experience

Tags: 3D, 3D cities, AEC, architects, architecture, BIM, building information modeling, CAD, collaboration, construction, digital twin, engineering, generative design, infrastructure, visualization

Categories: 2D, 3D, architecture, BIM, building information modeling, civil information modeling, construction, construction project management, engineering, field, field solutions, file sharing, infrastructure, IoT, managed services, plant design, point clouds, site planning, sustainable design

This entry was posted on Friday, April 17th, 2020 at 10:27 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.