Leveraging Digital Twin for Sustainability Assessment of an Educational Building

Lavinia Chiara Tagliabue, Fulvio Re Cecconi, Sebastiano Maltese, Stefano Rinaldi, Angelo Luigi Camillo Ciribini and Alessandra Flammini
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Lavinia Chiara Tagliabue: Department of Civil, Environmental, Architectural Engineering and Mathematics, University of Brescia, 25121 Brescia, Italy
Fulvio Re Cecconi: Department of Architecture, Built Environment, Construction Engineering, Politecnico di Milano, 20133 Milano, Italy
Sebastiano Maltese: Institute for Applied Sustainability to the Built Environment, University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland, 6928 Manno, Switzerland
Stefano Rinaldi: Department of Information Engineering, University of Brescia, 25121 Brescia, Italy
Angelo Luigi Camillo Ciribini: Department of Civil, Environmental, Architectural Engineering and Mathematics, University of Brescia, 25121 Brescia, Italy
Alessandra Flammini: Department of Information Engineering, University of Brescia, 25121 Brescia, Italy

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 2, 1-16

Abstract: The EU Green Deal, beginning in 2019, promoted a roadmap for operating the transition to a sustainable EU economy by turning climate issues and environmental challenges into opportunities in all policy areas and making the transition fair and inclusive for all. Focusing on the built environment, the voluntary adoption of rating systems for sustainability assessment is growing, with an increasing market value, and is perceived as a social responsibility both by public administration and by private companies. This paper proposes a framework for shifting from a static sustainability assessment to a digital twin (DT)-based and Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled dynamic approach. This new approach allows for a real-time evaluation and control of a wide range of sustainability criteria with a user-centered point of view. A pilot building, namely, the eLUX lab cognitive building in the University of Brescia, was used to test the framework with some sample applications. The educational building accommodates the daily activities of the engineering students by constantly interacting with the sensorized asset monitoring indoor comfort and air quality conditions as well as the energy behavior of the building in order to optimize the trade-off with renewable energy production. The framework is the cornerstone of a methodology exploiting the digital twin approach to support the decision processes related to sustainability through the whole building’s life cycle.

Keywords: digital twin; dynamic checklist; sustainable BIM (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

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