Integrating Energy System Monitoring and Maintenance Services into a BIM-Based Digital Twin

The digitalization process is steadily increasing in the building industry and promises new perspectives for better designing and operating buildings throughout their life cycle. However, digitalization has not yet brought its greatest benefit for tackling the rising global energy demand and is even generally associated with more energy consumption. Instead, it has become urgent to rationalize energy use and decrease energy wastes. Indeed, buildings are responsible for about one third of the global energy consumption in the world [1], and 30% of this energy is even wasted through wrong or suboptimal operation, malfunctions and energy-unaware user behavior. Technologies supporting resource saving already exist for e.g. fault detection and mitigation, optimized energy systems control or predictive maintenance. But they necessitate much manual effort by experts to be configured and deployed since every building is to some extent unique with regard to its location, equipment and usage. Moreover, they require much expert knowledge and are not adapted for a daily usage by facility managers or even building users. These measures require also many data for continuous observation, analysis and system adaptations in real time. Although modern building management systems (BMS) can generate lots of monitoring data from sensors and meters, there is still poor or no reuse of building design data already produced in preliminary stages of the building life cycles. In view of these facts, this paper proposes a new data management workflow that relies on the reuse of building design information for facility management, and that shall fasten the deployment of energy-saving services while increasing user energy awareness and engagement in reducing energy use. For that purpose, this workflow makes use of building information modeling (BIM), knowledge graphs, data analysis and web technologies in order to develop a BIM-based Digital Twin for energy saving in the building operation phase.