Imagine being able to see a building before it is built — to take a tour of its virtual twin. And then, when the real-life construction is revealed to the world, to have a digital record of the building that you can explore wherever and whenever you want.
Even if you haven’t played it, chances are you have heard of the city-building video game SimCity and Product Owner Dajana Molitorisova is currently working on a program that — in its simplest form — takes this fictional creation into the realms of reality.
But it’s important to remember that the Digital Lifecycle Platform is anything but a game — it has the potential to really shake up the entire construction industry.
Digital twins have administrators to monitor and supervise them throughout their lifecycle. And, to ensure maximum security and protection, users are assigned stringent access rights that enable them to safely take care of their buildings. This means they can view and work with the buildings, which are stored remotely in the cloud, from the comfort of their own office.
Smart buildings were just the beginning
Promising to make people’s lives easier, we spoke to Building Automation Specialist William Rubano earlier this year about how he applies his love of problem-solving to making buildings smarter. And Dajana agrees that automating buildings certainly offers a lot of solutions regarding the comfort of the people living and working in them. However, she says the platform she is working with takes the idea of smart buildings one giant step further by creating a digital twin — a virtual representation of real-world buildings that can be viewed and scrutinized in minute detail.
By building an identical version in the online world, people working on future construction projects can ensure the buildings of tomorrow are as efficient as possible. “Our products may sound like a fairytale — a bit like fiction, but that’s what we’re really working on,” she says.
This new program will create a catalog of digital buildings and will continuously collect data about them for use by architects, designers, developers, facility managers, and engineers. Not only will they be able to identify any issues before a fault or problem occurs, but they will also be able to make informed decisions about how buildings should be adapted in the future.
Enabling buildings to evolve
Perhaps an office building is losing too much heat, or bottlenecks are occurring in certain areas of a museum or a hospital. The program records these findings ready to impact future designs. “Now, thanks to digitization, engineers and specialists don’t have to go to the site in each case, instead they can use building data to find solutions,” she says.
It means customers will be able to view the building in granular detail. “You can access not only what the building looks like, but every part within them, and you can really use this information to modernize, renovate, or optimize in the future. The data will help improve the performance of a building,” she says.
The structures represented could be anything from hospitals, hotels, offices or banks. “It’s a safety repository for the buildings and their static and dynamic data,” Dajana says. Thanks to digital twins, you can walk through a real indoor environment and even choose the specific floor or room to see live data of its occupancy.
And as the construction industry is set to grow exponentially over the coming years, with the global market predicted to increase by $8 trillion by 2030, it means there’s a huge opportunity to analyze the performance of current buildings in order to improve those of the future.
One of the main ways that buildings will evolve is that they will become more energy efficient, something that will reduce their impact on the environment. A shocking 41% of the world’s energy supply is consumed by buildings, even more than the industrial sector and the transport industry. And perhaps even more alarmingly, a vast amount of the energy guzzled by these familiar structures is simply wasted. In the US, $0.30 of every dollar spent by organizations on energy is wasted through inefficiencies.
Dajana says the challenge of creating environmentally friendly buildings that have low energy consumption and also serve human needs is something that really interests her. In fact, one of the reasons she decided to pursue building engineering in the first place was because she wanted to work with green buildings.
Creating a timeless resource
It would be easy to think that this data already exists, but it’s never been collated in a way that could be universally useful. “At the moment,” she says, “when a building is completed, project documentation with all the construction data can easily be lost and then, later when it needs to be renewed, optimized or replaced, we sometimes have to start from scratch. Our purpose is to protect and link various kinds of data to not only gain results but also to gain knowledge about the life of the building.”
Ultimately, it will also pave the way for the construction industry to function in a more global, unified manner. “Every country currently has different norms and standards that need to be followed, but globally we can use the same terminology and the same principles and try to preserve long-term building data,” she says. It will provide the construction industry with a real opportunity to right the wrongs of the past, and use data to ensure buildings perform as efficiently as possible.
The Digital Lifecycle Platform has been in full swing for more than a year, but with a project that has as much potential as this, it was always going to be a laborious and technically challenging task.
“This seamless connection of two very powerful industries into one world is still a big challenge because, sometimes, it’s hard to imagine,” she says. “We’re working hard to find ways to connect this isolated data.” Currently, some real-life Siemens-owned buildings and customer projects feature on the digital system and the ambition is to ultimately capture digital twins of 500,000 structures globally.
“In the future, we will handle thousands of buildings across the world, and would like our users to be from various professions,” she says. “It wouldn’t matter if they’re architects, planners, construction companies, operators, owners or even tenants. The platform will be a place for better collaboration and useful exchange of information.” And it’s this aspect that has the potential to be incredibly unifying — it’ll smash silos within the construction industry and provide incredibly useful data to people in different lines of work who are based in various locations around the world.
Challenging the status quo is always going to be tough, and changing the mindsets of stakeholders including engineers and architects takes time. “Now, we have a huge amount of smart and automatized technology in buildings but you also need to know how to optimize it. We want to show people working with building information models what benefits the digitalization era brings,” says Dajana.
And when this task is completed? “We’ll be talking about not only the digitization of buildings, but also entire streets, neighborhoods, and communities.”
Dajana Molitorisova works for Siemens as Product Owner for the Digital Lifecycle Platform Project, she has been in her current position for one year. Find out more about working at Siemens.
