During the last edition of Sustainable Places conference held in Milan at the Monte Rosa 91 Conference Centre from the 8th to the 10th October our colleagues from BDTA Paula de Miguel and Elke Moors, Eduard Loscos from IDP and Fausto Sainz Salces from COMET attended the session “Real time simulation and monitoring of buildings: Hycool-IT SIMBOTS in datacenters” where Paula de Miguel explained the objectives and utility of SIMBOTS.

SIMBOTS encompass the representation of everything that can be simulated, from a building to each component or element that composes it. Simbots are not limited to buildings alone. A building of the future will have a perfect knowledge of its functionality, including energy efficiency, and will respond in terms of health, comfort and sustainability, on changes in occupancy, weather and operating conditions. The Building Digital Twin concept combines 3D geometrical information with a functional mathematical model, which may be used in all phases of construction, during commissioning, and for real time control during exploitation. To get this happen it is necessary to develop ready to use standardized components, which are called SIMBOTS at BDTA (Building Digital Twin Association). The objective of SIMBOTs development is to have a semantic neutral representation of equipment’s and other entities playing in real time simulation of a building. At the Hycool-IT project, a pilot of a data center has been used as initial sand box for testing. Several different simulation software have been used to compare methodologies. A number of SIMBOTs for a pilot data center will be presented, with the problems found in the possible standards for real time, and discussed together with software developers looking for feedback and improvements.

This workshop was intended for beginning a small group towards standardization of mathematical models of equipment and appliances in building simulations in real time. In HycoolIT project partners are doing some work in Data Centers (with no humans inside though) and we wanted to show some initial results. When working with building performance, humans, or any kind of simulation in buildings or energy performance this can  be interesting.

Simbots can help in managing the renovation/ restoration and maintenance of a (historical) building via a BIM-based digital twin platform that integrates indoor and outdoor sensors, climatic models for risk assessment, capabilities for organizing the historic data and everyday monitoring etc. Access and management of these data is provided via a VR application and an AR application in the field.

We are looking forward to further advances in the SIMBOT and Digital Twin environment.