Development of a Framework to Support Whole-Life-Cycle Net-Zero-Carbon Buildings through Integration of Building Information Modelling and Digital Twins

Decision-making on whole-life-cycle net-zero-carbon buildings is critical for addressing carbon emission and environmental problems. However, there is a lack of a data integration framework and an open international standard approach integrating key decision variables to support scientific computations and decision-making for whole-life-cycle net-zero-carbon buildings. Building information modelling (BIM) is an open international standard representing building information. Digital Twin (DT) can capture and monitor real-time building conditions to facilitate building operation. Integrating information acquired by DT with BIM has considerable potential to enable an open international standard based computational representation of key decision variables throughout the whole-building life cycle process. This paper aims to develop a novel conceptual framework that integrates BIM and DT to support net-zero-carbon buildings. The framework is developed using an open international standard approach and the ontology-based representation method, to define key decision variables using entities, properties, and relationships, and integrates captured data via DT. The research makes significant contributions to enable net-zero-carbon buildings and paves the way for future research on an automated system to support decision-making for the whole-life-cycle net-zero-carbon buildings.