A cyber-physical system approach for building efficiency monitoring

Digitalised models can play a key role in the management of building life-cycle. This paper focuses on the challenges connected to the operation phase of buildings, when the adoption of BIM can make information retrieval and management easier and more efficient. More specifically, a BIM-based cyber-physical system for the automated monitoring of buildings during their regular operation is proposed and tested by means of a customised simulator. The system automatically works out key performance indicators based on the overall throughput effectiveness (OTE) metric, assessing both the overall efficiency and the efficiency of every sub-system integrated in the building. Thus, assessments of the contribution of every sub-system to the operation of the building are performed in real-time. In addition, the metric proposed can help manage multi-objective real-time control. The system is self-reconfigurable thanks to the self-similarity assumption of the computational structure that is designed as a holarchy of holonic systems. The first application reported in this paper shows that when intelligence is embedded at both lower and higher levels, it is possible to generate information that is then used to update the digital model, developed as a BIM. As a result, the digital model becomes the mirror of the physical system and stores the actual performances recorded by the building to support facility managers in making decisions.