Towards Topology-Oriented Digital Twins for Built Heritage Performance-Based Management

The AECO industry accounts for significant global energy use and environmental impact. Given the ample supply of outdated buildings serving our everyday activities, there is an immediate need to adapt them to the functional, ecological, and economic requirements dictated by the built environment’s sustainable development goals. This objective presents significant challenges that necessitate a shift toward performance-based management of built heritage, a perspective to be grounded in the digitalisation of the sector, which, by its nature, is poorly digitised. To facilitate this transition, it is crucial to conceptualise digital tools capable of acquiring, structuring, sharing, processing, and visualising built asset data and capitalise it as knowledge for management operators. This research explores how emerging digital technologies, like Building Information Modelling and Building Performance Simulation, can be integrated into Digital Decision Support Systems (DDSS) to support built asset managers in decision-making and strategic planning within a performanceoriented perspective. The study initially defines a conceptual framework based on the Digital Twin (DT) paradigm to achieve this goal. Then, it develops methods and workflows for delivering DDSSs supporting building performance management, accessible and usable by non-digital expert operators through user-friendly services. These methods result in the realisation of a software toolkit. This toolkit is used to conduct a simulation-based demonstration on the heritage case study of the Faculty of Engineering in Bologna, providing insights into the building’s energy performance and its relationship with planned occupancy. The conceptualisation of the DDSS within a DT vision lays the foundations for its future extensions to other technologies, including, for example, dynamic sensor measurements, occupant feedback, and forecasting algorithms.