Crystal BIM Solutions Ltd.

While working on a very large international project employing BIM technology, in a discussion with our Italian client we discovered that we have a mutual interest on a subject that is more and more in the attention of a large array of specialists: equipment and building designers, facility management services providers, safety committees, city planners, etc.: digital twin. We decided to continue our dialogue on this subject and start a collaboration on a pilot project aimed to prove the benefits of this revolutionary approach.

These days I am working with a team of students with the Technical University of Civil Engineering of Bucharest to develop together a digital twin presentation material that would allow me to better introduce this concept to stakeholders interested in this subject. As I mentioned in my previous article, our Crystal System Group has a strong and special relationship with the academia in Romania and in a few other countries, many of our employees being recruited from among the best students participating in academic programs developed by Crystal System and universities.

As generally known, a digital twin is the digital representation of an actual object, that object being a building, a bridge, a stadium, a hospital, a vehicle moving on Mars, a turbine, etc.

What needs still be discovered are the benefits of a digital twin. Being specialized on BIM for buildings, I can refer specially to benefits building planners, designers, builders and operators can enjoy from a digital twin.

A digital twin starts as any regular 3D model of the object and in the planning phase it helps city planners ‘see’ the building in its future built and natural environment before being is built. Quite helpful when considering topics such as fitting the neighborhood, community resilience, public transportation, species protection, city infrastructure, etc.

During the design phase, a 3D model helps considerably to detect clashes and solve them while the project is still ‘on paper’. Also, especially in buildings with complicated MEP systems a 3D model is very useful when making best choices regarding the routing, the constructability, and the maintainability, of intricate pipes, ducts in cables in small spaces with rigorous requirements.

During the construction phase, the 3 to 5 D model helps construction supervisors keep a good control on progress and as a result on the best planned supply with construction materials and MEP equipment avoiding unharmonized expenditures and additional storage space.

By the time the building is built and the ‘as built’ drawings are included in the 3D model the level on ‘intelligence’ of the model can increase significantly. The IoTs placed in any and all processes taking place in the building are collecting massive information on things such as: air freshness, humidity and temperature, water supply, consumption and evacuation, electricity supply and consumption, level of occupancy, access control, seismic control as any other types of information depending on the purpose of the building. Between the actual building and its digital twin a permanent flow of information pulses both ways, every moment, day and night using one cloud technology or another. The massive amount of information is processed and interpreted by AI allowing building operators to make educated decisions regarding its administration and predictive maintenance. Even more, should the need for improvement arise, simulations of various options regarding the involved processes and related equipment and/or construction materials can be achieved on the digital twin, actual modifications being implemented based on simulations findings only when the results of the simulations are qualified and accepted.

One special remark should be addressed to something that might be a nightmare to building operators: data security. The more data is stored in one place and the more sensitive that data is, the more attention is given to the protection of that data against the human factor, the unauthorized access from within and from without, or against loss or corruption. Data protection is a very complex and challenging topic, subject to study and innovation. Maybe the blockchain technology could be the answer.

On the other hand, a possible solution to data security issues is even, paradoxically for some, the transport of data in the Cloud. Basically, Cloud services bring a new approach to data security issues, by sharing responsibility between the Cloud service provider, on one hand, and the user, on the other. This approach, of integrating Cloud solutions, in the BIM area, determines a new data architecture in the implementation of the requirements for a BIM model.

Moreover, a recent market trend in this area is to bring in the Machine Learning (ML) technology allowing the Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help in predicting anomalies, reducing energy consumption and making maintenance predictive. It requires real-time data streaming, low system latency, data storage solutions, processing and analysis, fast scalable computing solutions. Without the integration of Cloud solutions, all this would require considerable resources with high scalability costs.

A possible solution on which Crystal System experts are working is to integrate in the BIM model an IoT Gateway software, which, depending on the chosen cloud solution, can pre-define Cloud data transport architectures. This solution would allow the integration of data foreseen by legacy architectures (serial, KNX, Ethernet) with publisher / subscribe communication protocols, more precisely MQTT (MQ Telemetry Transport)

All these topics above mentioned are in our attention at Crystal BIM Solutions and Crystal System and together with our partners in universities, with our clients and our peers we move ahead towards viable and affordable solutions.