Showcasing the First Steps Towards a Digital Twin for Campus Environments

Abstract

This paper presents a path towards the implementation of a Digital Twin for campus environments. The main purpose of the Digital Twin is to accomplish an advanced analytical tool, which supports building owners, building operators and building users to reach an improved performance of the building. Digital Twins is new to the building and the real estate industry, hence research within this field is scarce. This paper contributes to the research by providing a methodology to implement a Digital Twin of an existing building stock of campus areas in Sweden. The main results obtained so far are presented. They indicate that the potential of a Digital Twin expands beyond the aspects of a navigational digital 3D model, including a state-of-the-art app that is developed from the Digital Twin platform.

Showcasing a digital twin for higher educational buildings: developing the concept toward human centricity

“…A challenge for building digital twins is that they must reflect their physical environment accurately. When there is a renovation or any other change that affects the building design, the digital twin needs to be updated (Bäcklund et al, 2022;Hosamo et al, 2023a). An outdated digital twin, based on faulty data, will affect its validity and credibility.…”

“…There are numerous definitions of a digital twin, and depending on the purpose and industry, definitions might vary accordingly (Liu et al, 2021). A succinct definition for digital twin technology for buildings has been provided by Bäcklund et al (2022), who suggested the following definition of a digital twin for buildings:…”

“…The IoT platform is dedicated to collecting and processing IoT-sensor data; sensor data from smart building systems; technical documentation from word, excel, or the facility management system; and external third-party data. For more information about technical details, the authors of this article refer to a conference paper where these phases are described in detail (Bäcklund et al, 2022).…”