Tools & Methods

SPHERE is a 4-year, Horizon 2020 project that aims to provide a BIM-based Digital Twin Platform to optimise the building lifecycle, reduce costs, and improve energy efficiency in residential buildings. SPHERE will help boost a building’s energy performance throughout its lifecycle and reduce time, costs and the environmental impact of the construction process. This promotes better design, construction and performance.

The development is rooted on the principle of Platform as a Service (PaaS). An underlying ICT Systems of Systems infrastructure based on PaaS service to allow large scale data, information and knowledge integration, and synchronization. During any phase of the building’s lifecycle, different stakeholders will be able to interact with this BIM Digital Twin model, based on the building’s information and a scalable set of different software tools. This is considered a vertical integrated processes.

For the duration of the project, we will provide demonstrations in 2 new buildings and 2 renovation residential buildings in Finland, Luxembourg, Italy, and Netherlands.

Sphere Integrates Two Planes of Research, Innovation and Improvement:

1. A building-centred Digital Twin Environment, involving not only the design and construction of the building but including also the manufacturing and the operational phases.
2. The seamless and efficient updating and synchronization of SPHERE’s Digital Twin platform based on an Integrated Design and Delivery Solutions (IDDS) framework.

Technologies

1. Digital Twin Prototype (DTP): This type of Digital Twin describes the prototypical physical artifact. It contains the informational sets necessary to describe and produce a physical version that duplicates or twins the virtual version.
2. Digital Twin Instance (DTI): This type of Digital Twin describes a specific corresponding physical product that an individual Digital Twin remains linked to throughout the life of that physical product.
3. Digital Twin Aggregate (DTA): This type of Digital Twin is the aggregation of all the DTIs. Unlike the DTI, the DTA may not be an independent data structure. It may be a computing construct that has access to all DTIs and queries them either ad-hoc or proactively.

Impact

• 25% Reduction in construction time
• 15% Less energy demand during the operational phase
• 25% Less CO2 and GHG emissions in buildings