=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2887/keynote1
|storemode=property
|title=Semantic Digital Twins for the Built Environment - a Key Facilitator for the European Green Deal? (Keynote)
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2887/keynote1.pdf
|volume=Vol-2887
|authors=Jakob Beetz
}}
==Semantic Digital Twins for the Built Environment - a Key Facilitator for the European Green Deal? (Keynote)==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2887/keynote1.pdf
Semantic Digital Twins for the Built Environment - a
Key Facilitator for the European Green Deal?
(Keynote)
Jakob Beetz1[0000−0002−9975−9206]
Design Computation, RWTH Aachen University, Schinkelstrasse, 65064
j.beetz@dc.rwth-aachen.de https://dc.rwth-aachen.de/
Keywords: Digital Twins · Open Standards · Ontologies · Buildings · Infras-
tructure
1 Abstract
1.1 Environmental Impact and Challenges in the Built Environment
Reducing the amount of resources that are used in the creation, maintenance
and use of the Built Environment from buildings to infrastructure is a key
factor in achieving the climate goals. A vast amount of primary resources is
spent during the construction of buildings, which uses 50% of raw materials
taken from earth. The energy needed to heat, cool, illuminate, connect the
fabric of the built environment contributes 36% to global energy use and
39% of energy-related CO2 emissions.
At the same time, the building industry is one of the most fragmented, decen-
tralized and diverse industries with nearly 3 million workers organized in 800.000
predominantly small enterprises. The vast spectrum of trades and sub-domains
along with the diversity of its products ranging from residential buildings to tun-
nels and bridges leads to a wide spectrum of information exchanged in temporary
processes with fragile value chains. At the same time, the building sector as a
whole is trailing in many productivity indices and in its state of digitalization.
The potential to save energy and to contribute to the reduction of the car-
bon footprint from the sector can be approached from a number of different
angles: Improved design and planning for the few new and the many existing
buildings; re-use and circular economy for the materials involved and synergetic
effects through increased vertical and horizontal integration of processes, and
subsystems. All this requires the integration of knowledge domains.
1.2 Semantic DTs in the Built Environment
The individual cyberphysical sub-systems that comprise the built environment
from individual buildings to vast and highly connected infrastructure networks
including traffic, energy, water and waste networks, are designed, operated and
maintained in completely separated, heterogeneous information silos with a very
Copyright © 2021 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative
Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
2 J. Beetz
low rate of digitalization. Representing, monitoring, simulating and optimizing
even of single nodes in these interconnected, multi-layered networks using dig-
ital twins has only just begun. Within a single domain of these networks such
as an individual building, a road-network or bridge, the current and past sys-
tem states, their long-term monitoring and improvement requires comprehensive
semantic models digital twin models. Such models are still in their infancy. Cur-
rent and evolving information models are still mostly designed to capture static
as-planned individual lifecycle stages, have bespoke and disparate insular solu-
tions and little to no vertical and horizontal connectivity with other nodes in the
network. Information exchange models for different aspects at various levels of
granularity from geospatial superstructures (GIS) to building components (BIM)
often have hundreds or even thousands of semantic entities and the sheer size of
the structured vocabularies to describe products range in the tens of thousands
of concepts which often differ on national or even regional levels.
1.3 Use cases and examples
In the presentation an overview of ongoing research, development and standard-
ization efforts regarding the creation, integration and interoperability of seman-
tic Digital Twins for the built environment is provided. Concrete challenges and
solution approaches of past and ongoing research from different use cases and
application domains of Semantic Digital Twins for
– the assessment and energy refurbishing of residential buildings
– monitoring and predictive maintenance of bridges
– road network interoperability with Linked Data across European bor-
ders
are used to illustrate these challenges. These include the semantic lifting of legacy
data models, the alignment and integration of vast domain vocabularies, multi-
modal integration of heterogeneous status information (sensor, images, measure-
ments) and ongoing efforts to create reference frameworks for semantically rich
Digital Twins in the built environment.