- CONVR 2023 - Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Construction Applications of Virtual Reality
- A cura di Pietro Capone, Vito Getuli, Farzad Pour Rahimian, Nashwan Dawood, Alessandro Bruttini, Tommaso Sorbi
Going Beyond Energy Consumption: Digital Twins for Achieving Socio-Ecological Sustainability in the Built Environment
- Dragana Nikolic
- Ian Ewart
- © 2023 Author(s) |
- CC BY-NC 4.0
- DOI: 10.36253/979-12-215-0289-3.106
Digital twins have attracted much of the attention from the researchers and policy makers as a potent industry-agnostic concept to support ambitious decarbonization goals. Consequently, much of the latest research has focused on computational methods for building and connecting digital twins to monitor and measure energy consumption and resulting emissions from buildings. At the same time, it has been recognized that achieving a truly sustainable built environment goes beyond environmental sustainability and is much more complex, calling for approaches that transcend any single discipline. Initiatives such as the National Digital Twin in the UK and globally, begin to offer a long-term vision of interconnected, purpose-driven and outcome-focused digital twins, grounded in systems thinking. Such approaches recognize the economic, social and ecological layers as critical data components in these digital ecosystems for understanding the built environment as a whole. Yet, social and ecological sustainability will remain difficult to address without involving allied disciplines and those from the realms of sociology, ecology, or anthropology in a conversation about the critical data sitting at the intersections between human behavior and technological innovation. In this paper, we review and discuss the state of the art research on digital twins to identify the disciplines dominating the narrative in the context of a sustainable built environment. We unpack a techno-rationalist view that emphasizes the sole reliance on technology for problem-solving and argue that by going beyond energy consumption and carbon emissions, digital twins can facilitate a more nuanced assessment of sustainability challenges, encompassing social equity, cultural preservation, and ecological resilience
- Keywords:
- Digital twin,
- socio-ecology,
- sustainability,
- smart city,
- review,
University of Reading, United Kingdom
University of Reading, United Kingdom - ORCID: 0000-0002-9502-2338
- Allam, Z., & Dhunny, Z. A. (2019). On big data, artificial intelligence and smart cities. Cities, 89, 80–91.
- Azar, C., Holmberg, J., & Lindgren, K. (1996). Socio-ecological indicators for sustainability. Ecological Economics, 18(2), 89–112.
- Batty, M. (2018). Artificial intelligence and smart cities. Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, 45(1), 3–6.
- Bonci, A., Carbonari, A., Cucchiarelli, A., Messi, L., Pirani, M., & Vaccarini, M. (2019). A cyber-physical system approach for building efficiency monitoring. Automation in Construction, 102, 68–85.
- CDBB. (2019). National Digital Twin Programme. https://www.cdbb.cam.ac.uk/what-we-did/national-digital-twin-programme
- Climate Change Committee. (2019). Net Zero—The UK’s contribution to stopping global warming. Climate Change Committee. https://www.theccc.org.uk/publication/net-zero-the-uks-contribution-to-stopping-global-warming/
- Delmelle, E. C. (2021). Toward a More Socially Impactful Geographical Analysis. Geographical Analysis, 53(1), 148–156.
- Evans, J., Karvonen, A., Luque-Ayala, A., Martin, C., McCormick, K., Raven, R., & Palgan, Y. V. (2019). Smart and sustainable cities? Pipedreams, practicalities and possibilities. Local Environment, 24(7), 557–564.
- Ewart, I. J. (2018). Humanising the Digital: A Cautionary View of the Future. In T. Dixon, J. Connaughton, & S. Green (Eds.), Sustainable Futures in the Built Environment to 2050 (pp. 325–335). John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
- Ferré-Bigorra, J., Casals, M., & Gangolells, M. (2022). The adoption of urban digital twins. Cities, 131, 103905.
- Green, S. D., & Sergeeva, N. (2020). The contested privileging of zero carbon: Plausibility, persuasiveness and professionalism. Buildings and Cities, 1(1), Article 1.
- Grieves, M. W. (2019). Virtually intelligent product systems: Digital and physical twins. Complex Systems Engineering: Theory and Practice, 175–200.
- Gultekin, P., Mollaoglu-Korkmaz, S., Riley, D. R., & Leicht, R. M. (2013). Process Indicators to Track Effectiveness of High-Performance Green Building Projects. Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, 139(12), A4013005.
- Ince, F. (2023). Socio-Ecological Sustainability Within the Scope of Industry 5.0. In Implications of Industry 5.0 on Environmental Sustainability (pp. 25–50). IGI Global.
- Kitchin, R. (2014). The real-time city? Big data and smart urbanism. GeoJournal, 79(1), 1–14.
- Korkmaz, S., Riley, D., & Horman, M. (2010). Piloting Evaluation Metrics for Sustainable High-Performance Building Project Delivery. Journal of Construction Engineering and Management, 136(8), 877–885.
- Levin, K., Cashore, B., Bernstein, S., & Auld, G. (2012). Overcoming the tragedy of super wicked problems: Constraining our future selves to ameliorate global climate change. Policy Sciences, 45(2), 123–152.
- Lupton, D. (2015). Digital Sociology. Routledge.
- Nikolić, D., & Whyte, J. (2021). Visualizing a New Sustainable World: Toward the Next Generation of Virtual Reality in the Built Environment. Buildings, 11(11), Article 11.
- Nochta, T., Badstuber, N., & Wahby, N. (2019). On the Governance of City Digital Twins—Insights from the Cambridge Case Study [Working Paper]. CDBB.
- Opoku, D.-G. J., Perera, S., Osei-Kyei, R., & Rashidi, M. (2021). Digital twin application in the construction industry: A literature review. Journal of Building Engineering, 40, 102726.
- Opoku, D.-G. J., Perera, S., Osei-Kyei, R., Rashidi, M., Bamdad, K., & Famakinwa, T. (2023). Barriers to the Adoption of Digital Twin in the Construction Industry: A Literature Review. Informatics, 10(1), 14.
- Papadonikolaki, E., & Anumba, C. (2022, October 26). How can Digital Twins support the Net Zero vision? [Proceedings paper]. 19th International Conference on Computing in Civil& Building Engineering (ICCCBE),. In: (Proceedings) 19th International Conference on Computing in Civil& Building Engineering (ICCCBE),. ICCCBE 2022: Cape Town, South Africa. (2022); ICCCBE 2022.
- Peters, D., & Schindler, S. (2023). FAIR for digital twins. CEAS Space Journal.
- Quek, H. Y., Sielker, F., Akroyd, J., Bhave, A. N., Richthofen, A. von, Herthogs, P., Yamu, C. van der L., Wan, L., Nochta, T., Burgess, G., Lim, M. Q., Mosbach, S., & Kraft, M. (2023). The conundrum in smart city governance: Interoperability and compatibility in an ever-growing ecosystem of digital twins. Data & Policy, 5, e6.
- Rabeneck, A. (2008). A sketch-plan for construction of built environment theory. Building Research & Information, 36(3), 269–279.
- Rudolph, D. (2023). The question of ‘sustainable’ technology: From socio-ecological fixes to transformations. Human Geography, 16(1), 81–86.
- Sadowski, J., & Bendor, R. (2019). Selling Smartness: Corporate Narratives and the Smart City as a Sociotechnical Imaginary. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 44(3), 540–563.
- Savage, T., Akroyd, J., Mosbach, S., Krdzavac, N., Hillman, M., & Kraft, M. (2022). Universal Digital Twin: Integration of national-scale energy systems and climate data. Data-Centric Engineering, 3, e23.
- Semeraro, C., Lezoche, M., Panetto, H., & Dassisti, M. (2021). Digital twin paradigm: A systematic literature review. Computers in Industry, 130, 103469.
- Shahat, E., Hyun, C. T., & Yeom, C. (2021). City Digital Twin Potentials: A Review and Research Agenda. Sustainability, 13(6), Article 6.
- Tzachor, A., Sabri, S., Richards, C. E., Rajabifard, A., & Acuto, M. (2022). Potential and limitations of digital twins to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. Nature Sustainability, 5(10), Article 10.
- United Nations Environment Programme. (2022). Emissions Gap Report 2022: The Closing Window—Climate crisis calls for rapid transformation of societies. http://www.unep.org/resources/emissions-gap-report-2022
- Wan, L., Nochta, T., & Schooling, J. M. (2019). Developing a City-Level Digital Twin: Propositions and a Case Study. International Conference on Smart Infrastructure and Construction 2019 (ICSIC), 187–194.
- Waring, T. M., & Richerson, P. J. (2011). Towards Unification of the Socio-Ecological Sciences: The Value of Coupled Models. Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography, 93(4), 301–314.
- Whyte, J., Fitzgerald, J., Mayfield, M., Coca, D., Pierce, K., & Shah, N. (2019). Projects as Interventions in Infrastructure Systems‐of‐Systems. INCOSE International Symposium, 29(1), 542–542.
- Whyte, J., Mijic, A., Myers, R. J., Angeloudis, P., Cardin, M.-A., Stettler, M. E., & Ochieng, W. (2020). A research agenda on systems approaches to infrastructure. Civil Engineering and Environmental Systems, 37(4), 214–233.
- Whyte, J., & Nikolić, D. (2018). Virtual Reality and the Built Environment (2 edition). Routledge.
- Ye, X., Du, J., Han, Y., Newman, G., Retchless, D., Zou, L., Ham, Y., & Cai, Z. (2023). Developing Human-Centered Urban Digital Twins for Community Infrastructure Resilience: A Research Agenda. Journal of Planning Literature, 38(2), 187–199.
- Yigitcanlar, T., Han, H., Kamruzzaman, Md., Ioppolo, G., & Sabatini-Marques, J. (2019). The making of smart cities: Are Songdo, Masdar, Amsterdam, San Francisco and Brisbane the best we could build? Land Use Policy, 88, 104187.
- Yossef Ravid, B., & Aharon-Gutman, M. (2023). The Social Digital Twin:The Social Turn in the Field of Smart Cities. Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, 50(6), 1455–1470.
Informazioni sul capitolo
Titolo del capitolo
Going Beyond Energy Consumption: Digital Twins for Achieving Socio-Ecological Sustainability in the Built Environment
Autori
Dragana Nikolic, Ian Ewart
DOI
10.36253/979-12-215-0289-3.106
Opera sottoposta a peer review
Anno di pubblicazione
2023
Copyright
© 2023 Author(s)
Licenza d'uso
Licenza dei metadati
Informazioni bibliografiche
Titolo del libro
CONVR 2023 - Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Construction Applications of Virtual Reality
Sottotitolo del libro
Managing the Digital Transformation of Construction Industry
Curatori
Pietro Capone, Vito Getuli, Farzad Pour Rahimian, Nashwan Dawood, Alessandro Bruttini, Tommaso Sorbi
Opera sottoposta a peer review
Anno di pubblicazione
2023
Copyright
© 2023 Author(s)
Licenza d'uso
Licenza dei metadati
Editore
Firenze University Press
DOI
10.36253/979-12-215-0289-3
eISBN (pdf)
979-12-215-0289-3
eISBN (xml)
979-12-215-0257-2
Collana
Proceedings e report
ISSN della collana
2704-601X
e-ISSN della collana
2704-5846