How Digital Twin Technology Powers the New Era of Smart Buildings?
Published on : Tuesday 31-03-2020
The real estate industry, compared to other industries, has always been lagged in embracing technological innovations. The industry players have fallen short in delivering their ability to remain flexible for future needs. This means they have minimal data access and their information is inadequately structured and siloed in individual buildings systems. This caused them in terms of major cyber breach risks and incredible financial cost every time they unleash a new technology at scale. Digital Twin technology, in this way, comes into existence, creating a big impact at the organizational level.
The technology, particularly, enables building operators to bring together previously separated systems to garner new insights, optimize workflows, and supervise processes remotely. A Digital twin is typically a digital representation of a physical asset or anthology of physical assets, which offers real-time data about how those assets are performing. As presenting 2-dimensional or 3-dimensional models, the technology provides accurate visualization of buildings and infrastructure networks to building operators.
Digital Twins can also be utilized to give inhabitants more control over their own workspaces and environmental conditions, by this means enhancing their experiences. Building owners and operators can leverage this tech, by optimizing systems and connecting people, to minimize costs, evade future costs, augment occupancy rates, and perk up overall asset value. Using digital twins also provide continuously updated information on a project’s status or live building operational data and facilitate machine learning capabilities.
Technology to Drive Smart Buildings
Technology for smart buildings is making manual control of a building's heating and cooling conditions, and the adoption of this tech within commercial real estate space is redefining the future of building management.
Today, smart buildings are becoming more dynamic and customized for individual requirements, particularly within the office space. Moreover, the ability to work remotely from anywhere has put extreme pressure on building owners and operators to provide an enviable environment and service. As the traditional setup isn't working longer enough, the workspace is continuously changing and transforming the nature of work. Embracing digital twins not only enable a better understanding of how our buildings and cities function, but also assist in making our environments safer, healthier, and more liveable.
A smart building makes use of a blend of technologies to automate building management. For instance, software manages the number of variables of a building's operation, such as temperature and lighting. On the other hand, sensors are used to identify changes like the rise and fall of temperature or motion in a room and feed that information back to the software. By deploying sensors throughout a building, the building management system can target temperature and lighting changes according to the rooms that need adjustment. Furthermore, the building data are tracked over time so the software can adapt to changes that fit with occupancy or seasonal changes.
Building managers can also use an automated system to spot the vacant parts of a building and turn off lights in those rooms. This can even make the same adjustments for temperature so that facilities managers can save energy on vacant parts of their buildings.
In a smart building, different systems have their own ability, with their own interfaces and zero communication with external systems. In this scenario, automation is started getting fully integrated into the same network with other systems, including from smart LED light bulbs and speakers, to CCTV cameras, smart heating solutions, fire alarms, and elevators.
So, when the world will fully be connected to the Internet and everything will work wirelessly, we can ultimately have smart buildings where the above technologies will communicate with each other. According to a report from MarketsandMarkets, the Smart building market is predicted to value USD 105.8 billion by 2024, up from USD 60.7 billion in 2019. The market is growing at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 11.7% during the projected period.