Leveraging Digital Twin for Sustainability Assessment of an Educational Building

Abstract

The EU Green Deal, beginning in 2019, promoted a roadmap for operating the transition to a sustainable EU economy by turning climate issues and environmental challenges into opportunities in all policy areas and making the transition fair and inclusive for all. Focusing on the built environment, the voluntary adoption of rating systems for sustainability assessment is growing, with an increasing market value, and is perceived as a social responsibility both by public administration and by private companies. This paper proposes a framework for shifting from a static sustainability assessment to a digital twin (DT)-based and Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled dynamic approach. This new approach allows for a real-time evaluation and control of a wide range of sustainability criteria with a user-centered point of view. A pilot building, namely, the eLUX lab cognitive building in the University of Brescia, was used to test the framework with some sample applications. The educational building accommodates the daily activities of the engineering students by constantly interacting with the sensorized asset monitoring indoor comfort and air quality conditions as well as the energy behavior of the building in order to optimize the trade-off with renewable energy production. The framework is the cornerstone of a methodology exploiting the digital twin approach to support the decision processes related to sustainability through the whole building’s life cycle.

An IoT-Aware Solution to Support Governments in Air Pollution Monitoring Based on the Combination of Real-Time Data and Citizen Feedback

“…Instead, a final consideration is necessary on the works proposed by Rinaldi et al [19] and Tagliabue et al [20], the one that, by applying an approach similar to the one presented in this paper to different situations (indoor monitoring), actually validate our approach. Although their automatic intervention in the mitigation of revealed situations cannot be directly applied to cities (i.e., no HVAC is appliable to a city) and, anyway, would limit the potentialities of direct interventions of city officials, in fact, their works already laid the basis for the exploitation of similar solutions in smart cities like the one proposed in the present paper.…”

“…Tagliabue et al [20] propose a framework to support the real-time evaluation and control of a wide range of sustainability criteria within a building. The paper adopts a user-centered point of view and exploits a combined approach based on Digital Twin (DT) and Internet of Things (IoT).…”

Artificial Intelligence-Driven Digital Technologies to the Implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals: A Perspective from Brazil and Portugal

“…Regarding the preferability of AI-Driven DT, it is highly manifested by digital educational platforms to revolutionize different disciplines to fulfill the SDG, in part because of their wide spread of reaching populations in many layers of society [77,78]. That information is an asset that can later be analyzed to make better decisions to improve learning processes, predict changes and failures, and continuously oversee the evolution of SDG indicators.…”

Digital Twin An Aid To Sustainability: “The Samba” Case

“…Others describe the use of the digital twin for sustainability assessment through rating systems such as LEED, extending their use throughout the entire life cycle of an asset which includes the design phase and the use phase (Tagliabue et al, 2021).…”