Enabling Digital Twins with Advanced Visualization and Contextualization of Sensor Data with BIM and Web Technologies

The construction industry is going through a technological paradigm shift due to growing user needs and the demand for a sustainable built environment. The advancement of Building Information Modelling and web technologies allows to integrate heterogeneous datasets and develop innovative user-oriented applications. Several efforts aim at increasing the utilization of BIM and operational building data, but the integration of virtual models and the physical world to enable adaptive interaction and bi-directional coordination is still in its infancy. The Digital Twin paradigm has gained popularity in research, but also faces challenges related to its adoption in the industry. Data visualization within a Digital Twin is significant when communicating complex multimodal data from heterogeneous sources. Therefore, this paper proposes a web-based platform for visualization of spatio-temporal building data to enhance Human-Data Interaction and implementation of Digital Twins in the built environment. The implemented application is tested and evaluated with two use cases and the end user.