A Smart Building Digital Twin Can Unlock the Potential of Your Assets

Smart building digital twins model the physical assets they represent, providing a link between simulated and real-world structures. Especially useful in data-driven smart buildings, digital twins are becoming an important tool for optimizing building operations and performance. But which type of smart building digital twin is best to unlock the potential of your assets? 

What Is a Smart Building Digital Twin? 

Digital twins use sensors to accurately measure a building’s performance. With data gathered from a smart building’s sensors, key variables like energy usage, climate control, and occupant behavior are more easily identified and described. This data allows engineers, IT managers, and other stakeholders to determine how a building will react under certain conditions. Essentially creating a virtual model of a smart building, digital twin technology also helps evaluate the performance of its systems and subsystems. 

The following are necessary for a smart building digital twin:

• Data that pertains to how a building is used, including its operational systems, IT infrastructure, occupant behavior, and other factors
• Situational awareness about the state of the structure and its occupants, delineated from real-time data collected by smart sensors 
• Data analysis that produces meaningful insights
• Key performance indicators to align objectives with evaluation of building performance

Smart building digital twins link the physical structure to a digital model, using sensors that collect data in real-time to accurately portray how a building will react in specific situations.  

In a smart building, digital twins go beyond just gathering data. They are also used to control physical systems and simulate changes in conditions to predict possible future events. This allows you to implement cutting-edge predictive maintenance techniques. 

Benefits of Smart Building Digital Twins

Digital twins offer several advantages for design engineers, IT managers, and other stakeholders involved in building operations. These include supporting: 

• Cost savings through the use of faster, better decision-making 
• Predictive maintenance
• Remote real-time monitoring and control
• Risk assessments prior to the start of construction

These capabilities are powerful and can transform both operations and performance of your smart building. The challenge is to implement the right smart building digital twin that is most beneficial to optimize building performance and improve predictive maintenance.  

Choosing the Right Smart Building Digital Twin

Understanding smart building digital twins is important to ensure you choose the best approach for your building. Some of the key aspects of smart building digital twins are:

Considering these points, a system and asset digital twin is typically the most helpful for operators looking for improved performance of their buildings, along with a robust predictive maintenance program. The digital twin combines different assets of a smart building system and monitors and gathers the generated data in one place. This allows for easy utilization of the real-time data by the building management, resulting in meaningful asset tracking and management. It also makes it possible to simulate operations and compare historical data to project any potential anomalies in equipment functions and optimize asset maintenance. 

Every smart building is unique with specific digital twin requirements. With Buildings IOT, you can better assess the smart building digital twin that works best for your premises and create a healthy, comfortable, energy-efficient, and sustainable infrastructure for your tenants.