BIMyVerse is a hypothesised iteration of BIM, enabling the online digital twin of cyber and physical environments, starting from building elements and extending towards buildings, urban infrastructures and city-scale services. BIMyVerse is an attractive brand name aspiring BIM in the City and Cities as a uniVerse.
From Bricks to Clicks, and Clicks to Flicks
What is BIMyVerse
-BIMyVerse presents a semantic, interactive, scalable, interoperable, and modular architecture that integrates the cutting-edge technologies of BIM, GIS, IoT and cyber-physical systems, Artificial Intelligence, Extended Reality, data security and blockchain-enabled decentralised verification and validation of BIM and urban processes.
-BIMyVerse, a bridging technology that links hardware-based cyber-physical IoT systems at a low level with software-based multimodal solutions at a high level covering the BIM-GIS data governance, AI-enabled smart tools for information management and Extended Reality for the best visualisation, interaction and simulation.
Motivation
-The main motivation of BIMyVerse is to increase the level of digitisation and interaction among nodes, persons and services in building, construction and urbanisation processes aiming to minimise the on-site chaos and support the transformation of the BIM economy by developing and delivering cutting-edge research outputs for improved, safer and more effective construction through Digital Twin.
Rationale
-Although BIM opens a new era and brings new hope for better digitisation in the construction sector, it is nonetheless still lacking all the dynamic support capability as required throughout the major stages of a typical construction site (design, procurement, construction and service). Each stage has different information requirements, leading to different ‘BIM models’ for each phase and consequently inefficient data handling. Instead, we need a Digital Twin (DT) that builds up incrementally throughout all these phases and covers not only buildings that are already in play, to be built, renovated or demolished, but also their surroundings and coupling with the city-scale universe in the loop.
Applications Areas
For building permits
BIMyVerse allows guidelines to be modelled and applied to BIM models. Fully digital and even instant access to building permit data speeds up its approval process. It facilitates reviews and updates in the building lifecycle thanks to centralised information and documentation for permits processing, automated validation and digital update during the permit process and public enquiry.
For building and AEC operational management, efficiency and monitoring
The buildings within their urban context are living things, changing throughout their lifecycle. BIMyVerse presents an IoT-based semantic framework that enables the effective monitoring of BIM, GIS and sensory data for buildings in actual use (e.g. maintenance), at the construction phase and renovation or transformation phase, for their more efficient operational management.
For earthquake & fire safety
BIMyVerse allows inspectors to ensure that a building complies with fire and earthquake regulations, such as by querying a 3D model for semantic properties or by annotating a 3D model during an inspection.
For Crisis and Disaster Management
BIMyVerse presents the combined use of BIM-GIS-IoT data that can be utilised in crisis and disaster management, e.g. to identify evacuation routes and train citizens using virtual or augmented reality about what to do or not to do during a fire or an earthquake. Also, to ensure that the building is tested by simulating earthquake and other disaster scenarios, akin to the ‘digital twin’ paradigm.
For the circular economy and Construction and Demolition Waste (CDW) Management
BIMyVerse enables Recycling Reusing, Refurbishing, and Reducing (R4) of CDW by modelling and mining of valorisable materials within a building or a district (urban transformation area) and the option to design buildings with future extraction in mind.
Environmental Safety and Green Deal Resilience
Hazardous materials and materials that require special attention when handling can be properly taken care of before repurposing, refurbishing or demolishing a building. Quantities and locations can be calculated in advance and appropriate measures can be taken preventively.
Promotion of AEC and Business
One picture is worths a thousand words. What about a demo? It is worths millions of pictures. BIMyVerse enables an online interactive and game-like environment by enabling eXtended Reality to showcase AEC products. BIMyVerse helps revolutionise the promotion and sales of AEC projects by shifting the building-only and static-design paradigm to a living virtual environment integrated with historical and instantly-monitored data. By doing so, a customer can see not only the apartment she/he will pay for but also its potential and real cost as a function of its value within its urban context (e.g. city plans, traffic, urban transformation, etc.)
BIM security
BIM is usually applied for critical infrastructures, like hospitals, public buildings, skyscrapers, bridges, tunnels, metro stations, etc. Unfortunate but the fact is that such gigantic architectures are open to terrorist attacks. BIM includes much critical information about an infrastructure that may include its vulnerabilities as well. BIMyVerse presents an active authentication and fast and reliable BIM data encryption to protect critical and sensitive data against unauthorised attempts to reveal the secrets of a building.