Designing a BIM-enhanced digital twin architecture for construction pollution management in building renovation projects

Pollution created by building renovation activities poses a hazard to human health and the proximate environment. Integrating building information modelling (BIM) with digital twin (DT) technology offers a promising means for real-time monitoring and enabling collaboration among project participants. However, it is challenging to transform the BIM models of a renovated facility into a DT platform for monitoring and reporting construction pollution on-site. This paper proposes a BIM-enhanced DT architecture for managing construction pollution in building renovation projects. The platform entails five key components: physical entity (PE), virtual model (VM), DT data (DD), services (Ss), and connections (CNs). To resolve ambiguities in information requirements, a novel Level of Information Need (LOIN) framework for BIM-enhanced DT was established. The interplay among LOIN, Level of Development (LOD), and DT functionalities defines the minimum information needed in the information containers and the metadata structure required for pollution hotspots, compliance assessment, and automated analytics. To illustrate its efficacy and practicality, the DT architecture was applied to an auditorium renovation project, where static BIM data were integrated with dynamic pollution parameters captured by IoT sensors and managed in a Common Data Environment (CDE). The results showed its capability to systematically and efficiently acquire, integrate, treat, and analyze important data.