Andressa's PhD

The Industry 4.0 revolution has grown the necessity of the Facility Management (FM) discipline to deal with live data. Therefore, the Digital Twin (DT) concept and its inherent characteristic of real-time asset representation can significantly support the FM sector and its management processes. DTs can be essential for operating “dynamic facilities”, understood as those undergoing recurrent changes in their layout. For the information models as the primary source of information and graphical representation in a DT, open formats such as IFC are encouraged (open BIM). However, because of the high complexity of the IFC schema, the representation of real-time layout modification of IFC-based DTs is a challenge to be overcome due to the necessity of object-based modifications. Therefore, Andressa’s PhD research proposes an approach to implement Next Generation DTs able to reflect real-time objects’ location and live integration using the IFC schema.

The work is being conducted through a collaborative effort between the University of Minho in Portugal and the École de Technologie Supérieure in Canada.