Digital Twin for Sustainable Building Design, Operation and Management
Digital Twin technology shaping the future of building design and operation
A building’s whole life span can range from fifty years to over a hundred years. It goes through multiple phases from planning, design, construction, operation and maintenance, renovation and continued use, and end of life. The Digital Twin principle and WISDOM being a Software as a Service (SAAS) platform, take advantage of the cloud based IT infrastructure to bring disruptive changes to how buildings are designed, operated and maintained.
At the design phase, the 3D visualisation, interactive and collaborative working, and predictive simulations among various design choices can produce qualitative and quantitative outcomes better fitting to regulatory requirements with higher work efficiency. Digital Twin can help at the operation phase in multiple ways. Equipped with big data, high performance computing and AI, it’ll be the essential tool for monitoring and predicting energy use and carbon emission in real time, managing energy saving and carbon reduction in a highly effective way.
It can also be used for asset management, equipment maintenance, fire safety training, and extending a building’s use and enjoyment on the cloud. It’s our vision that every building, large or small, can benefit from having a digital twin for life, and we have the methodologies and approaches to help.
WISDOM combines 3D graphics with thermal engineering to create actionable insights
Buildings are 3D structures with typically complex heat and fluid distribution and energy flows. Materials used, construction methods, and operational controls combined with external weather conditions and internal activities all contribute to how energy is consumed and the amount of carbon emission is produced.
3D graphics pinned on the GPU technology that we excel in, is not just a helpful visual aid, but an important means of presenting the controlling factors for energy and carbon changes in spatial and temporal distributions, that help operators make informed decisions on manual and automated interventions towards energy saving and carbon emission reduction goals. The WISDOM cloud platform and our thermal engineering expertise put us in a unique position to deliver scalable business solutions to clients for more energy saving, carbon reduction, and better experiences to users and operators of buildings.
A scooter tour of key features of a net zero house
Building owners or facility managers can use WISDOM to make decisions in everyday operations
WISDOM as a cloud platform is mature for business services. For each building in question, we work with clients to create a digital twin and a bespoke solution on top of WISDOM that meets the requirements for owners, facility managers and other users who would benefit from using the system.
Depending on the use case scenarios, we would build in the needed data connections such as energy consumptions and the configurability that users can apply to run simulations, leading to informed decisions that they can act on in everyday operations. We would usually enter into service contracts with the clients to incorporate new demands and change requirements in the bespoke solutions so the digital twin keeps serving the buildings, their owners and operators in the best way possible.
In the development roadmap of WISDOM, we’ll continue to develop its capabilities and autonomous use so clients and their own technical teams can tap into it for more powerful outcomes with fewer bespoke elements that we have to provide in the future. We aim to make WISDOM a world dominant Digital Twin software platform for building design and operations.