Extending BIM for Air Quality Monitoring

As we spend more than 90% of our time inside buildings, indoor environmental quality is a major concern
for healthy living. Recent studies show that almost 80% of people in European countries and the United States suffer from
SBS (Sick Building Syndrome), which affects physical health, productivity and psychological well-being. In this context,
environmental quality monitoring provides stakeholders with crucial information about indoor living conditions, thus
facilitating building management along its lifecycle, from design, construction and commissioning to usage, maintenance
and end-of-life. However, currently available modelling tools for building management remain limited to static models and
lack integration capacities to efficiently exploit environmental quality monitoring data. In order to overcome these
limitations, we designed and implemented a generic software architecture that relies on accessible Building Information
Model (BIM) attributes to add a dynamic layer that integrates environmental quality data coming from deployed sensors.
Merging sensor data with BIM allows creation of a digital twin for the monitored building where live information about
environmental quality enables evaluation through numerical simulation. Our solution allows accessing and displaying live
sensor data, thus providing advanced functionality to the end-user and other systems in the building. In order to preserve
genericity and separation of concerns, our solution stores sensor data in a separate database available through an
application programming interface (API), which decouples BIM models from sensor data. Our proof-of-concept
experiments were conducted with a cultural heritage building located in Bled, Slovenia. We demonstrated that it is
possible to display live information regarding environmental quality (temperature, relative humidity, CO2, particle matter,
light) using Revit as an example, thus enabling end-users to follow the conditions of their living environment and take
appropriate measures to improve its quality.