The Digital Twinning group at TUM CMS has been selected to join the NVIDIA Applied Research Accelerator Program. This program is set up to support applied research at universities with state of the art GPUs. The grant is used to strengthen our research in ML-based point cloud methods in the field of Scan-to-BIM.
Hochschulpreis des bayerischen Bauindustrieverbands geht an Dr. Cornelius Preidel (1. Platz) und Ya Chun Bollig (3. Platz)
Dr.-Ing. Cornelius Preidel hat den ersten Platz des Hochschulpreises des bayerischen Bauindustrieverbandes an der Technischen Universität München in der Kategorie „Digitales Planen und Bauen“ für seine Dissertation „Automatisierte Konformitätsprüfung digitaler Bauwerksmodelle hinsichtlich geltender Normen und Richtlinien mit Hilfe einer visuellen Programmiersprache“ erhalten.
Ya Chun Bollig hat den dritten Preis für ihre Masterarbeit „Geometrical and Topological Linking of Railway Systems“ erhalten.
This proposed project is focused on enabling the open exchange of information to provide better fire safety decisions when developing and operating buildings.
It includes the development of two Model View Definitions (MVDs) to support Occupants Movement Analysis (OMA) and Fire Safety Engineering (FSE) in the BIM IFC model. The project team which consists of multinational practitioners was formed after identifying a lack of support within the current IFC model for OMA and FSE. Regulations and building codes require a broader scope of fire safety data to support compliance by ensuring a “golden thread of information” for fire safety analysis. For emergency and non-emergency movement of occupants, it is necessary to provide support for simulation data (for emergency movement, both fire and evacuation data is required), together with the maintenance of such data as building use and requirements change over time. This project is based on the Project Activity proposal “MVD proposal for Fire Safety Engineering and Occupants Movement analysis” which was accepted by the buildingSMART in 2019.
More information can be found here.
In memory of Chuck Eastman
(1940-2020)
Charles (Chuck) M. Eastman was the godfather of model-based design and engineering of buildings. As early as 1970, he invented concepts and technologies that laid the foundations for what later became known as "Building Information Modeling" and is now widely established standard in the AEC industry.
He was a passionate, open-minded and dedicated researcher. The academic community has benefited enormously from his contributions, and will do so in the future. We lose an exceptional scholar, and a good friend.
BIM2TWIN: Optimal Construction Management & Production Control
On November 1st, 2020 the research project BIM2TWIN has started. It is funded by the European union through the Horizon 2020 program. The project is led by Centre Scientifique et Technique du Bâtiment (CSTB) in France. Next to the Chair of Computational Modeling and Simulation (CMS) at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), the consortium partners include Technion, University of Cambridge, INRIA, FIRA, ITsite, TECNALIA, Acciona, Ruhr University Bochum, Spada Construction, the Universita Politecnica delle Marche, UniSmart, Orange, Siemens, IDP and Aarhus University.
BIM2TWIN proposes a comprehensive, holistic approach to application of the digital twin concept to building construction. It consists of a digital building twin platform and an extensible set of construction management applications that provide full situational awareness. In the current state of the art, researchers and startup companies have taken a direct approach – identify a construction management problem, select one monitoring technology to provide data, and attempt to provide a valuable service. Yet this is severely limited, because a) the reliability of information inferred from a limited data stream is unreliable and inaccurate, and because the approach is not extensible nor scalable. Instead, the BIM2TWIN platform pools multiple monitoring data sources, interprets and merges the data to provide information, and exposes the information to a suite of construction management applications (through an application programming interface – API) and/or directly to users through an visual information dashboard.
Simply cobbling together a selection of monitoring technologies and devising appropriate applications would fail to deliver the potential fundamental change that digital twins make possible for construction. Therefore, BIM2TWIN places development of the fundamental principles for a Digital Building Twin at the core of the research that we propose. The key features that distinguish BIM2TWIN are:
- Grounded conceptual analysis of the nature of data, information and knowledge in the context of digital building twins, which underpins a robust digital building twin system architecture. A unique feature of the architecture is the common platform for data acquisition and pre-processing that serves the needs of a wide variety of services for construction management, which is central to the BIM2TWIN concept.
- Property graph representation of the data monitored on and off-site, of the Project Status Model (PSM) and incorporating and referencing the Building Information Model (BIM). The knowledge graph enables a) flexible, scalable storage of raw monitoring data in different formats, and b) storage of interpreted information in a form easily accessible to all functional software applications.
- BIM2TWIN implements the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) management approach at every level, making it extensible, thoroughly supporting the full range of construction management functions.
The goal of these unique features is to build a platform that is tailored:
- To enable smooth transition from construction phase to operation phase. The property graph platform will be based on technology from partners Orange and Siemens which serves their operations phase digital building twin solutions.
- To implement lean construction principles through PDCA cycles, thus reducing operational waste of all kinds, including energy consumption.
- To enable integration of the Digital Building Twin within the hierarchy of digital twins that includes digital twins of construction equipment and smart city level digital twins.