Development of a Building Tool Combining Building Information Modeling and Digital Twin

Abstract

Modern building automation systems are subject to major challenges. Their architecture becomes increasingly diversified. Recent developments, such as increased digitization and Internet of Things (IoT) enable new implementation and application opportunities. The provided capabilities increase at every system level starting from more powerful embedded devices over development of more advanced integration concepts and networking solutions to modularization at application level and distribution at edge/cloud level. These changes are tightened on the information modeling level. The main modeling method regarding the generation and management of digital representations of physical and functional characteristics of buildings is referred to Building Information Modeling (BIM). However, new developments in context of Industrie 4.0, such as the Digital Twin (DT) require considerations how both approaches can be combined. In this paper, we present various use cases in building automation systems that benefit from DT-approach, discuss different architectural approaches that were proposed to implement DT-based systems, and finally describe the tool that implements our approach combining BIM and DT to provide real time information about installed assets in a building in an overview as well as on detailed-level.