Advancing the use of space data and digital twins in cities
The BUILDSPACE project, coordinated by a Greek software and IT solutions company - SingularLogic, showcases how Copernicus data, combined with digital twin technologies, can be transformed into practical decision support tools for making buildings more energy-efficient and cities more climate-resilient.
The project took a user-centred and co-creation approach, involving more than 100 stakeholders, including city authorities, urban planners, engineers and researchers from 7 EU member states (Belgium, France, Greece, Latvia, Poland, Slovenia, and Spain) and an associated country, the United Kingdom.
Using GNSS and digital twins to identify heat loss
BUILDSPACE designed and tested five services. Two of these services combined drones, thermography and simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM), benefiting from the precise navigation and positioning provided by GNSS, to reconstruct a digital twin of a building’s structure and help understand as well as optimise its energy-efficiency.
“These services help building facility managers, urban planners, and real estate and construction companies understand the state of the building in terms of heat loss or other energy-related incidents, which can be observed in the digital twin,” explains Stamatia Rizou, R&D manager, SingularLogic.
Leveraging Copernicus data for climate control and adaptation
With the application of Copernicus data, the project delivered three city-scale services that can predict how climate change, urban heat and flooding impact a city’s-built environment.
For example, the urban heat analysis tool integrates Copernicus with socio-economic and demographic data to assess how urban heat impacts a building’s energy demand.
By combining geospatial datasets, standardised models and Copernicus climate projections, the built environment climate scenarios service can estimate and project residential stocks’ energy demand through an interactive and web-based tool.
Lastly, the urban flood resilience service combines Copernicus land use data and local data to provide users with map-based calculations for assessing expected flood damage to buildings as well as identifying urban flood vulnerability hotspots.
The project evaluated and validated these services across four European cities with different climate profiles: Warsaw (Poland), Riga (Latvia), Piraeus (Greece), and Ljubljana (Slovenia). By leveraging these advanced and space-based applications, BUILDSPACE demonstrated how space data can be transformed into actionable decision-support tools for making buildings more energy efficient and cities more climate resilient.
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