Case Study
RESEARCH PARTNER
CIMS Lab @ Carleton University
PROJECT
Campus Digital Twin
CAMPUS SIZE
62 Hectares (153 Acres)
LOCATION
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
INDUSTRY
Academic
TRAX SERVICES
BIM Repository, Modeling and Instrumentation Protocol, Visualization Design
LINK
Research Partner Background
Situated on unceded Algonquin territory beside the historic Rideau Canal, an official UNESCO World Heritage Site in Ottawa, Canada, Carleton University was founded by the community in 1942 to meet the needs of veterans returning from the Second World War. Carleton University is a public university in Canada's capital, home to 31,000 students and 2,000 staff and faculty, with ambitious sustainability goals and an advanced digital campus agenda. Five kilometers of underground tunnels conveniently link the University’s 40 buildings.
The Carleton Immersive Media Studio (CIMS) is a Carleton University Research Centre (CURC) affiliated with the Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism in the Faculty of Engineering and Design. Over the past decade, CIMS has built an international reputation working with public, private, and not-for-profit partners. Their diverse portfolio demonstrates the value of new and emerging digital technologies for architectural rehabilitation, heritage conservation, and the Architecture, Engineering, Construction, and Operations (AECO) industry more generally.
Project Overview
The CIMS Lab has an ambitious vision for a multiscale multi-purpose digital twin of the Carleton University campus together with the surrounding urban context and beyond. Leveraging their expertise in the representation of heritage architecture and processes, building information modeling, and laser scanning, CIMS has developed large datasets that cover large regions. A key challenge is how to manage these datasets, make them accessible, and interconnect them into holistic models from which applications can be developed.
While a handful of software systems exist that support the integration of multiple datasets, there are significant limitations. What is needed is a cloud-based scalable data set repository with integration functionality, that has multi-level interaction and visualization support. Some video game systems have comparable core functionality but are lacking in terms of unconstrained datasets and functionality for AECO professionals. Furthermore, beyond the visualization functionality, streaming sensor data visualization and dynamic analysis of the data in context is needed.
RICHCRAFT HALL – CARLETON CAMPUS
To deliver a scalable AECO system, Trax is joining the effort with CIMS as part of a long-term research project to develop both core functionality and several applications at the campus and urban scale. CIMS has already started design efforts for such a system as part of the Urban Futures initiative. Urban Futures: intra/inter brings together a diverse group of researchers and research programs from across all five faculties at Carleton University to collaborate with public, private, and not-for-profit partners on questions and challenges at the intersection of the social and operational dimensions of “smart city” technologies. Their research considers diverse governance structures, shared transportation and utility networks, housing, emergency services, food security, environmental stewardship, culture, and cultural heritage.
Scope of Work
Trax Services
BIM Annotation with Sensor DB
LOD Automation
Model Checking Automation
Trax Platform
Asset Repository
Digital Twin
Document Management