Digital twin-driven building projects: a new paradigm towards real-time information convergence throughout the building lifecycle

Influenced by the successful applications of emerging technologies, the manufacturing industry has entered the Industry 4.0 era, which highlights the trends of autonomous factories and smart production processes based on digital twin. In parallel, high- volume and multiple types of data streams have been widely established in the building and construction industry, which traditionally integrated in the building information modeling (BIM) platform. However, the effectiveness and reliability of cross-stage information transmission remain to be an obstacle in the development of BIM, reflected in the erroneous and inadequate information delivery, and thus impair the decision- making capacity of project participants. Here, we introduce a digital twin-driven paradigm as the new approach for automated and smart building workflow throughout building planning, design, construction and maintenance processes. Through the digital twin technology, interactions between physical and virtual world are operated and driven by a hybrid system comprised of big data, internet of things, and reverse engineering technologies. A small-scale model-making experiment and a gymnasium building case are conducted to demonstrate the digital twin framework. Overall, digital twins- driven building projects enable real-time data convergence accordingly to the time- based changes, making it possible to pursue the next stage of intelligent buildings and Industry 4.0.

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ISBN
978-1-944214-31-9