Unified Application Interfaces for Digital Twin Based Asset Management in Smart Built Environment

The management of assets in the built environment requires reliable, timely, and consistent information to support maintenance, operation, and long-term value optimisation. In practice, asset-related data are generated by multiple heterogeneous systems, such as Building Management Systems (BMS), asset registers, and digital twin platforms, but these sources are often siloed and lack an asset-centric structure. This fragmentation complicates maintenance decisions, leads to data duplication, and makes many existing Asset Management Systems (AMS) difficult to scale when new data sources are added. This challenge is significant in digitally enabled and sustainability-driven built environments, where long asset lifecycles and performance targets require integrated and high-quality information across systems. Current AMS solutions are mainly based on data integration approaches that focus on system-to-system connections rather than asset-focused access, limiting their ability to support scalable digital twin-based management. This study proposes an approach for implementing asset-centric RESTful application interfaces based on a microservice architecture to unify asset information from distributed and heterogeneous data sources in a smart building. The proposed architecture introduces a mapping layer that abstracts underlying data sources and exposes standardised asset-level endpoints, enabling semantic alignment without extensive data replication. The results show that such unified interfaces improve information consistency and enable scalable integration of new systems, supporting more informed and effective asset management within digital twin ecosystems at both building and district levels.