Press Releases

Digital Twin Consortium publishes building performance user guide

July 20, 2023

Posted by: Janmesh Chintankar

Dan Isaacs of DTC

Digital Twin Consortium (DTC) published The Why and the What of Digital Twin Building Performance and Sustainability: An Owner’s Perspective. This guide is designed to assist an owner or occupier with new or existing digital twin-based building decarbonisation implementations throughout the lifecycle.

This 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 decarbonisation, net-zero, and sustainability plans. These targets typically include goal setting such as achieving net-zero by 2030, erasing carbon footprint by 2050, and decarbonising across global portfolios by region by specific calendar years,” says Dan Isaacs, GM and CTO of the DTC. “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 to optimise the performance of a built environment, guiding organisations as they decarbonise, to reduce their environmental impact. The user guide shows how a digital twin can help building owners develop a roadmap and implement the best possible solutions to lower the building’s environmental impact, ensuring sustainability for generations. The guide also discusses digital twins’ positive effects in optimising long-term building performance.

“As 2030 net-zero objectives become 2040 and 2050 requirements, building owners need to explore new proactive and holistic solutions. This user guide demonstrates how digital twins can help deliver these transformative changes and recognises that our industry needs to collaboratively reduce the impact of our built environments,” says co-author Todd Lukesh, client engagement manager and sustainability lead, Gafcon Digital. “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 working group (AECO) wrote the guides to offer additional detail following the publication of the whitepaper: Decarbonising 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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