Digital Twin Consortium Publishes Digital-Twin Building User Guide

Understanding the objectives behind digital-twin-based decarbonization efforts

Published: Thursday, August 17, 2023 - 11:00

(Digital Twin Consortium: Boston) -- Digital Twin Consortium (DTC) has published The Why and the What of Digital Twin Building Performance and Sustainability: An Owner’s Perspective. This is the first of five user guides designed to assist an owner or occupier with new or existing digital-twin-based building decarbonization implementations throughout the life cycle.

This first guide addresses such questions as, “Why should we do this?” and, “What are the objectives for sustainability, efficiency, resiliency, health, risk mitigation, performance, reliability, and accountability?”

“Many owners have set aggressive decarbonization, net-zero, and sustainability plans,” says Dan Isaacs, general manager and CTO of DTC. “These targets typically include goal-setting, such as achieving net-zero by 2030, erasing carbon footprint by 2050, and decarbonizing across global portfolios by region by specific calendar years. The new user guide can help building owners determine if they are aggressive enough in their strategies and approaches to achieve these targets, and how digital twins can play an important role.”

The Why and the What of Digital Twin Building Performance and Sustainability: An Owner’s Perspective looks at the foundational elements necessary to optimize the performance of a built environment, guiding organizations as they decarbonize to reduce their environmental impact. The guide shows how a digital twin can help building owners develop a road map and implement the best possible solutions to lower the building’s environmental impact, ensuring sustainability for generations. It also discusses digital twins’ positive effects in optimizing long-term building performance.

“As 2030 net-zero objectives become 2040 and 2050 requirements, building owners need to explore new proactive and holistic solutions,” says co-author Todd Lukesh, client engagement manager and sustainability lead at Gafcon Digital. “This user guide demonstrates how digital twins can help deliver these transformative changes and recognizes that our industry needs to collaboratively reduce the impact of our built environments. Digital twins help building owners adopt data-driven approaches to help them understand not only how a building is performing, but also how it should be performing.”

The DTC Architecture, Engineering, Construction, and Operations (AECO) working group wrote the guides to offer additional detail following the publication of the white paper, “Decarbonizing the Built World: A Call to Action,” which outlines how to reduce carbon emissions using performance-based digital twins.

DTC will publish the remaining user guides throughout the summer.

Download The Why and the What of Digital Twin Building Performance and Sustainability: An Owner’s Perspective for more information and a complete list of authors.

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