Digital Twin

Get to know the digital twin

The next gamechanger for digital design and buildings.

BY RICHARD BAKER AND SETH ELY

2020 may be the year of the digital twin.

For designers and planners facing the challenges of designing a smarter, more sustainable building and community, the digital twin is potentially a powerful game-changer. But what exactly is the buzz about? What is a digital twin, what elements define it? When can/should we apply this technology? What makes it so powerful? And how will its adoption influence our design process and ultimately our buildings and cities?

Denver Water Administration Building Denver, Colorado

In general, today’s systems and data are distributed and siloed, they are difficult to manage and understand as a whole. But what happens if we create a unified data platform that places all this data together, side by side? Across the industry, the ideal metaphor for a digital twin is the “single pane of a glass.” Ideally, we are creating a single pane of glass to look into the building where all systems are in one spot.

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Number of Cities

Administrative – internal data from across departments and city services

Top five categories of data cities are using now

A digital twin is a digital representation of a physical environment that collects real time data, it’s where the real world meets data science and computational engineering. This digital model incorporates not only the building information model, but also live system data from devices within the building. All these different data streams are brought together and expressed in a common 3D environment to, in simple terms, recreate the physical world. It allows users and operators to query, analyze and track the inputs as well as the parameters of the model itself to create a variety of uses.

Buildings have been collecting data for years. It’s the 3D representation that enables us to visualize the data and see it in real time that’s the game changer. This data rich platform allows us to see and use that historical collection of data to understand how a building performs and how it’s being used. Rather than a virtual “mirror” of the building, the digital twin is a visible abstraction of all the usable, relevant data about the building.

This unified data platform is overlaid with a system featuring multiple, customized user interfaces. The building operator will work with an interface that shows the more relevant KPIs, say energy consumption and occupancy. Another user might access the data related to emergency preparedness to see how the building will operate during an extreme weather event. Another access point might show employees where the available desks are in a free address system.

Source: Building a Hyperconnected City, a survey of 100 cities by ESI ThoughtLab co-sponsored by Stantec

Artificial Intelligence – data derived through AI and machine learning

Citizen satisfaction – data sourced from surveys of citizens VS Business data – sourced from local company customer trends/activities

Real-time – data used immediately after it is generated

IoT – data from the interconnection of devices and machines

Now

In 3 years

100

What is a digital twin?

It's visual

A single pane of glass

User interfaces and dashboards

Lincoln Square Bellevue, Washington Architect: HKS Architects Lighting design by Stantec

Internet of Things Internet of things or IOT devices are devices that collect data from a sensor and send that data to the cloud. In the cloud, a conglomeration of data from many devices has the potential to relay a lot of intelligence about everything from room occupation to technology use to temperature and air quality. By combining IOT sensors and IOT live data inputs with the digital twin, we create a powerful tool. Hot data vs. cold data Buildings and systems sometimes collect data without making it accessible or actionable. That's cold data. When we’re making data relevant and usable, we’re turning it into hot data. The digital twin deals in hot data.

What are the elements that make a digital twin?

A smart building's digital twin

How the digital twin will influence building design and operations

Typically, in the process of design development you research, you develop strategies, you build, you implement, and you evaluate. You do the next project with the feedback from your previous project in mind. We accumulate design feedback sequentially from project to project. Digital twin technology changes all that. A digital twin gives us access to continuous and ongoing feedback around systems, performance, and utilization within the building through data visualization. With this continuous access, we can simulate changes to the system before they are implemented. Practically, the digital twin is likely to have a profound effect on how we design buildings. Either by code or by training, designers are taught to over design in the current paradigm which impacts costs and sustainability. By understanding the data, we can reduce overdesign and update codes to create truly sustainable smart buildings. And we’re just getting started imagining the potential of the digital twin. In theory, the future digital twin will harness the power of AI to refine and improve systems autonomously.

THE INSTANT FEEDBACK LOOP

The power of a digital twin really starts to get interesting if we think about aggregating data digital models of buildings within a defined area. Once we can aggregate individual building’s digital twin into districts or geographies, we can realize the power of a smart city. We’ll be able to uncover efficiencies possible with district heating or water or other interconnected infrastructure. We’ll be able plan and build more resilient communities because we can test scenarios for extreme weather events or pandemics using the digital twin. That’s game changing.

INTEGRATING THE DIGITAL TWIN AT THE DISTRICT LEVEL

At present, the typical digital twin often consists of minimal characteristics modeled onto and specific to one type of system. We have yet to see fully integrated, 360-degree integration. We think the most powerful platform in the future will be an integrated, unified model that unifies disparate systems within a building, offering users a broad range of KPIs.

A UNIFIED MODEL

We’re just starting to understand the collective power of the digital twin.This data-rich approach is going to change the way we design buildings, cities, and our sustainable future.

Stantec Tower New England, US

The digital twin promises to make building data visible so it can be accessed and analyzed by end users to support their goals. Actionable building data is hot data.

Hot Data

Building systems have always produced a lot of data but it is typically only accessible to engineers and does not provide any value to users. This is cold data.

Cold Data

This Globe and Mail series speaks to the breadth and depth of our experience in Smart Cities

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