Smart Building Digital Twins for Healthcare

Digital twins are shifting facility management from reactive operations to proactive, data-informed decision-making. By integrating live building data with calibrated virtual models, facility teams gain continuous insight into performance; enabling early fault detection, optimized energy use, and more strategic capital planning.

Rather than relying on periodic audits or static documentation, digital twins support ongoing commissioning, scenario testing, and evidence-based decision-making across the entire building lifecycle.

When deployed effectively, digital twins serve as the analytical backbone for more resilient, efficient, and low-carbon buildings, representing a fundamental shift from managing assets to managing performance.

Active research areas include

• Cognitive digital twins for fault detection and diagnostics
• Digital twin-enabled frameworks for Smart and Ongoing Commissioning (SOCx)
• Large-scale portfolio modelling to support decarbonization planning
• Integration of heterogeneous data sources, including BIM, IoT, and utility data
• Surrogate models for rapid simulation
• Decision-support tools for facility managers operating under uncertainty