In the era of connections and information and communication technologies, the building industry is facing the challenge of digitization at the building and urban scale. Several researches have been carried out to generate virtual city models to manage and represent a variety of data to reach the smart city concept. Therefore, the development of building/urban digital twins is directly linked to the definition of innovative methods and tools that are able to collect, organize, query heterogeneous data to make it available for the various involved actors. This chapter aims at presenting the district information modelling methodology that is strictly related to the digital twin concept, starting with data domains, arriving at the various tools developed to reach the users' needs.
TopBackground
The city has always been considered as a meeting place where a series of complex dynamics linked to human beings' habits take place. From this point of view, it can be considered a living organism that transforms itself into the function of the society that inhabits it (Pagani & Chiesa, 2017). Vice versa, the population adapts itself to the city in which it lives, assuming behaviors that could change in another city according to its characteristics. The urban transformations that have taken place over the centuries have been driven both by the growing needs of citizens and by the technological innovation that has developed throughout history.
Over the centuries, the management of the city has been subjected to the needs of the population, which in different forms modified the urban ecosystem to improve the usability of space and optimize human activities, finding answers to the need for transformation and urban renewal according to the lifestyle of citizens and the adopted technologies.
These transformations have been often influenced by the demographic, industrial, and economic growth of countries, ignoring the aspects related to the sustainability of interventions, thus developing not very resilient cities to climate change and exceptional events caused by land degradation.
However, in recent years, more attention has been paid to the capacity of cities and buildings to adapt to climate and socio-economic change by setting several constraints to be respected on environmental sustainability.
In this sense, the EPBD directive refers to Smart Ready Technologies (SRT) which should be disseminated in the existing building stock to achieve significant energy savings with a consequent economic gain, while helping to improve indoor thermal comfort so that the building can adapt its energy behavior considering the user's needs.