Tracking Users’ Behaviors through Real-time Information in BIMs: Workflow for Interconnection in the Brescia Smart Campus Demonstrator

An intelligent building supports the needs of its occupants by data analytics. Nowadays, buildings are evolving from being products to become effective service providers for end-users: thus, occupancy topics become crucial. The paper focuses on building operations, pointing out how advantages in supporting the needs of users could be derived through the implementation of Building Management Systems (BMS) into a Building Information Modeling (BIM) environment, connecting real-time information collected by sensors to a BIM database. The connection and the integration of information between BIM and BMS have been established based on the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) neutral data format; moreover, web-interfaces and apps have been tested for enhancing information to be visualized by different end-users. The ongoing research has a twofold scope: 1) to point-out how buildings should evolve, managing knowledge coming from sensors in order to anticipate the needs of users, and 2) to analyze whether and how the centrality of users should change the building process. The proposed workflow has been tested on the Brescia Smart Campus Demonstrator, a building equipped with 94 off-the-shelf sensors.