Digital Building Logbook: How the AEC Data Model Is Revolutionizing Digital Tracking of Building Information in the EU

GIOVANNI COVIELLO: Welcome, everyone. The topic of this presentation is Digital Building Logbook-- How the AEC Data Model is Revolutionizing the Digital Tracking of Building Information in EU. Let me introduce first myself and my colleague. I'm Giovanni Coviello, AEC application engineer. And my colleague with me is Jacopo Chiapetti, senior analyst and developer. Together, we work in One Team.

One Team is a platinum partner Autodesk company in Europe and, for the last 25 years, has been transforming technologies and skills into value. By offering consulting services and IT solutions for the IC sector and the mechanical sector. These are few numbers of the company. It counts almost 100 employees, 42 millions revenue, 11,000 customer, and 60,000 managed users.

In the recent years, One Team decided to use its experience within the IC sector as a technology partner to push its boundaries. By doing what? Research and innovation project for Europe in collaboration with other companies. So, currently, the company has six European project in its portfolio and all of them share a common mission-- promoting energy efficiency and sustainability.

In this presentation, we will talk in particular about one of these project, which is built on a 6-plus million project budget started in April 2023. Here, there is the project team involved in the BuildON development. And now let's jump into the agenda for the presentation.

We will introduce the European building sector and explain the importance of the Horizon Europe research and innovation project. We are going after more in detail on the BuildON project and explaining the concept of the digital building logbook and, at the end, why we decided to implement the AEC data model within the building logbook.

If we look at the EU building sector, buildings in Europe are responsible right now for approximately 40% of the energy total consumption and 36% of the greenhouse gas emission. This is making the building sector one of the most energy-intensive sector in the EU. For this reason, in April 2024, EU decided to adopt an energy performance of building directive.

This directive has long-term and short-term goals. The long term is to achieve that, by 2050, All the buildings in the EU should be a zero-emission building. But if we look at the EU building, more than four-fifths were built before 2000. For example, me and my colleague are from Italy where most of the building assets in our city were constructed well before the year 2000, even before the year 1000. And all of these will require renovation because of their pure energy performance.

If we are going to look more in details about the directive, we see that there are goals even for the middle term. For example, residential building must reduce their average primary energy by 20%-22% before 2035. And if we consider no residential building, they have to renovate the 26% of the worst-performing building by 2033.

These are the considerations made for the existing building. For the all-new building, there are rules that are going to be implemented. After 2030, all the new buildings must have zero on-site emissions. For this reason, to achieve these sustainability goals, and following the timeline, Europe is using its research and innovation program called Horizon Europe in order to boost the AEC sector towards a sustainability transition.

Horizon Europe is the EU largest funding program for research and innovation. It's supporting a project that drives sustainability, enables collaboration between the companies in Europe and research institutions, and is going to boost the economic growth and industrial competitiveness. For the period 2021--2027, Europe is investing around 93 billion in this research program, Horizon Europe. And, in the following video, we will have an introduction of one of these Horizon projects that is the protagonist of this class of today, which is BuildON.

[VIDEO PLAYBACK]

- Welcome to BuildON, a new project revolutionizing the future of smart buildings. BuildON is an EU-funded project leading the way towards a new era of affordable and digital solutions for the next generation of smart EU buildings. In a world facing the challenges of decarbonization and digitalization, BuildON is at the forefront of change.

Over 42 months, we'll be combining cutting-edge technologies to optimize the energy performance of buildings, our mission-- to redefine buildings as flexible building as a service entities, no longer static structures but dynamic, adaptable, at the service of people. Enter the smart transformer toolbox, a system of three components for efficient management of smart buildings. An IoT edge or cloud interoperability framework.

A MAPO system of analytics and optimisation services. A digital twins virtual simulation. The toolbox will provide affordable, adaptive, and easily accessible services supported by a set of user-empowerment tools to guide in the smartness, upgrade, and facilitate human smart assets interaction.

[END PLAYBACK]

GIOVANNI COVIELLO: BuildON is a European project, focuses on the transition towards the decarbonization and digitalization of the buildings. But how this transition will happen? It will happen by the development of technological solutions for the energy efficiency.

Here on the side is indicated also the website. So please subscribe to this newsletter to get more updates because the project started in April 2023. And, right now, we are around month 18.

The project is 42 months in total and is going to test the technological solution developed into different five pilots across the continent. We choose five different buildings around Europe. Considering different climate zone, as you can see from the map, there are two residential building, one in Spain and one in Finland.

One office building in France, one kindergarten in Poland, and one commercial building in Greece. We choose so different climate zone in order to verify the effectiveness of the digital solution for the energy optimisation in the various climate zone but also in different typology of buildings. So we have residential building, offices, or commercial spaces and public buildings.

The idea is to moving from a static perspective of the building to a flexible building as a service approach. The project is considering the participation of a consortium of 20 companies, coming from different areas of Europe and different expertise that are research institutions, private companies, or universities.

If we focus in One Team in particular as a technology partner, it's responsible during the project of the development of two main digital tool, a digital building logbook and a digital twin. You might be familiar already with the concept of digital twin within the AEC sector. But let's now go more in detail about the concept of the digital building logbook and why could be essential for the next years for the energy transition.

If we look already at the European building directive, the digital building logbook is already part of the main scheme. It's considered as a pivotal element for the data exchange within the building sector. For this reason, we decided to implement inside the building BuildON project as a technology solution.

I'm going now to give more details and the concept of the digital building logbook. The building logbook can be considered as a flight recorder of the building asset. If we think about a flight recorder, it is a black box that is recording all the action and activities happening during a flight from the departure till the landing. This is the same for a digital building logbook.

It's going to record everything that is happening during the building life cycle. For this reason, the digital building logbook is going to be a centralized repository and, during the entire life cycle, promoting and contributing to improve inside the AEC sector different aspects. For example, the data quality and the reliability of the data and their standardization is going to help to improve the regulatory compliance to make informed decision-making.

It will also foster the interoperability. And it will promote the transparency and accountability because, inside the construction sector, it is going to represent and provide a level playing field. And this will support also a new business model.

The digital building logbook will store different type of data that span from static data but also to dynamic and interactive data. For this reason, we decided to classify and organize the different data types that are going to be collected within the digital building logbook into five main categories that I'm now going to explain. The first categories are the documentation related and the data related to the general and administrative information.

These data are, for example, documents related to the ownership document, property tax, insurance, or regulatory certification for health and safety, especially for public building. These are the minimum documents that every owner of an apartment or of a building has at home but not in a digital tool. The concept is to move these documentation within a common environment in a digital platform.

The second type of category are the building construction information. These are the information like the plan of the building, the hierarchy of the technical building system, so how the equipment are connected to each other, or which mechanical or electrical system are installed within the building and their characteristic or their documentation and instruction.

The third category are the building energy performance. These information are like energy certificate such EPC or LEED or BREEAM certificate, monthly and annual energy metered consumption or also the utility bills for the electricity and water. And there will be also the energy production that is happening in the building by the renewable sources.

A fourth category are the building operation and use data. These are information related to the maintenance of the building, so during the operation phase. We have the operational manual for the building system. We will have the operator schedule like when the cleaning is happening in communal area or the waste management. And, also, there will be integrated alert and event logs.

And, finally, the fifth category, the building logic behaviors. In this category, we are going to collect these smart building data system and automation, considering also the energy forecasting and benchmark and analytic and predictive maintenance report.

Let's now go into deep dive about the main challenge that we are facing for the development of the digital building logbook and how we decided to solve. We say that the logbook is going to collect data generated through the BIM processes, including as-built model, building specification, and construction documentation. But, currently, we are facing a challenge because we know that in the AEC sector it is difficult right now to move data from one phase to the other during the building lifecycle.

We have what is called the handover gap. So this is one of the first challenges-- collect all the data during the different phase of the construction, but also during the phase of the operation of the building. Together with a second challenge that is provide a universal access to this platform. We are not talking about for the digital building logbook for a platform restricted only to architect or engineering.

The platform will be accessible to different typology of users persona. We created four main groups of user profile that might be willing to use the platform. First of all, the building owner and tenants, which are looking for a common data environment to store all the building-related information to have the energy consumption, all the history for the renovation and the maintenance records.

The second category are the public authorities and the administration. Depending on the European level, national level, regional level, all of them will have access to the logbook in different way. And it will support them for decision-making or to transmit and store building permits data, for example.

A third category are the technician and the construction stakeholders. So all the people involved within the AEC sector as a architect, engineer, contractor, which are looking for specific information of the building, how was constructed, how the system are functioning, and all the data necessary for a possible renovation in order to improve the energy efficiency.

And, finally, our fourth category of user persona which are the utilities companies and financial companies. Utilities will share the information metadata, the collected of the annual consumption, for example, for the building. And the financial companies, they will look for investment analysis and loan feasibility.

For this reason, our challenge was how to find a way to deliver tailored data to address each user specific needs and requirements. And, for this, we think that the solution is the transition from a traditional file storage system to a metadata-driven access system. Now my colleague Jacopo is going to explain the technical solution in order to solve this challenge.

JACOPO CHIAPATTI: So why I see data models for DBL? In the past, we did other projects that use BIM data. And, to do that, we have to load models with external libraries, example for IFC, with Revit, with design automation, check for different version, trap errors, pass models, and write data into a large relational database that need maintenance over time. This was very time and resource consuming and, also, a predefined use-case log in because relational database means predefined relations.

This traditional workflow was a very complex tech stack. AEC data models means fast implementation and lean delivery. No need to use libraries, Revit, design automation, propellers and version, pass models. No need to large DB maintenance over time. Just put models in the [? IPS ?] app and go.

I see that the model is user oriented. Graphical [INAUDIBLE] means predefined relations, but relations could also be created by user depending on their needs. It's very easy to apply variation of preconfigured data queries. We need other relations and/or data just create a new GraphQL query. And, finally, hopefully, in the near future, not in this slide, we will be able to provide custom property to the AEC data models back, so no need to write back in the original model and to retrieve geometric data for elements.

The DBL integrates a wide range of data sources, both static and dynamic. The BIM models, so AEC data model, other CDE, classic data, involved in the project, obviously. Time series DB cloud like smart things and other custom solution and API services.

All sources could be interrogated with GraphQL queries, which is also used for AEC data model to retrieve data for different application, so user and management, the tree viewer, the twin, the digital twin, and so on, providing granular data for every stakeholder involved in the process. At the core of the DBL solution is the AEC data model. [INAUDIBLE] common formatting and cloud-oriented data management, which improves data retrieval, speed, and accuracy.

It uses GraphQL-based approach to link data points, providing users with the ability to query data on interrelated factors. And whatever the user is looking for, the tailored energy consumption reports or structural data or other data, the AEC data model ensure that the right data is delivered.

Looking at it, this is the DBL platform roadmap for the BuildON project outlines, the future development phases. We started in the 2023. The DBL ideation, in the beginning of 2024, we integrated the AEC data model and complete the first architecture setup. Currently, we are working mainly on user interface testing and corrections.

We will have the first technical release at the end of 2024, followed by the beta release in 2025. OK.

GIOVANNI COVIELLO: Thank you.

JACOPO CHIAPATTI: I give back.

GIOVANNI COVIELLO: And, now, as a conclusion, I'm going to show how it works the digital building logbook with the integration of the AEC data model. We envisioned the digital building logbook more than just a repository. We designed as a range of application tools that is going to help the user to access and interact with the data they need about their buildings.

For example, we identified a user and role management app that is going to control and set up the access rights-- access right for every user and which data they will be able to see or modify. A building data management, which is an interface that is going to be structured as a table format containing the key building elements and all the related documentation.

In this way, the use of a consistent table format will ensure an easy and readable interface to quick access to data. A 3D BIM viewer because, of course, we have engineer and architect now working in the third dimension with the BIM models. And we want to integrate the viewer of this BIM models in order to make it easier, the asset localization, for example.

An application that also we define called as a building data explorer. This is a tool powered by a large language model AI that is going to enable the user to search for element and extract quantitative information, for example, using the everyday language. And, finally, the digital twin dashboard, which is the application used to monitor the live building performances and forecast depending on the asset available and the sensor installed.

This is the schema that is summarizing all the application tool together with the different data types category that we identified before, associated with the main users persona for each of them. Let's go now to see the actual platform and its functionalities. This is the interface for the home that a user will access.

If we think about a property manager will have an interface where we'll see the location of the building, communication like the alert or reminder of the specific building, together with a member list. In the member list, they will be indicated all the people part of the building like owners or contractor or public authority, and also the list of all the companies involved in the building. In the company list will be indicated with a company card as well the information of the specific people from that company involved in the asset property and their access role.

Here, instead, we can see the building data management section where, as we said before, is a table format interface. It is going to contain the minimum information required for each building. And there will be-- we will manage to extract from the BIM models when available. In this way, we are using the AEC data model to directly query the model and extract and visualize this information within this table format. In fact, this is an example of the AEC data model query integration that is extracting the project information.

This is, again, a building data management area but also integrated with a 3D BIM viewer. We are visualizing the structure of the building divided by levels, units, and systems. We are able to identify the different building technology system within the-- contained within the asset, for example, a domestic hot water system.

Explore the different equipment that are part of that specific technological system, and visualize the asset and their location within the building together with their PDF documentation, for example, like the instruction. And all of these data will be extracted with the digital-- with the AEC data model. This is in fact an example of a query that right now is extracting the levels of the building and creating the interface.

This is instead the third application that we identify as a building data explorer. The building data explorer will use a simple search engine where, with the help of a large language model AI, we will translate the request in a natural language for a user, for example, a maintenance person to the AEC data model GraphQL language.

In this way, someone will be able, for example, to, like in this example, to extract the maintenance of the specific equipment, mechanical equipments on a specific period of time, like the one that will be, they will require maintenance by next December. And this is the specific query translated that will identify all the mechanical equipment that has also the maintenance in that specific time frame.

This is the list of the application tool that we identify, and we are going to integrate within the interface of the digital building logbook and dismissing the digital twin dashboard because we think that the digital twin dashboard will be directly linked to our second deliverable inside the BuildON project that was the digital twin level four.

The digital building logbook in our vision will act and to be directly interconnected to the digital twin because it's going to feed and gather data into each other. They're going to feed and gather data into each other.

As explained before, the logbook will play as a digital registry and data repository and is going to be a data feeding into the digital twin, which will run action like run checks, inspect, mapping the information together with the ilive IoT sensors, information data, and after running simulation like energy simulation, LCA, LCC, and prediction forecast.

The result of this simulation will be after send back as insight for the user inside the digital building logbook, so into the digital twin dashboard that we are envisioning. We will perform the digital twin and this interface with the use of Tandem API.

And now let's wrap the conclusion and the work-- during the development of the digital building logbook, thanks to the AEC data model, we are able to use the BIM model as primary source of truth. We are able to optimize the data storage and the DevOps because we are minimizing the implementation of different API endpoints.

We are saving times for data retrieval because we are not spending time to extract, transform, or unload process data. And, also, we are able to make precise data retrieval for each user's persona. And this is possible only thanks to the AEC data model query structure. Thank you for watching the presentation.