Nov 2024
Digital twins in social housing: How can they work for you?
A digital twin is a virtual representation of a physical object, system, or process, and accurately mirrors the real-world counterpart throughout its lifecycle by using real-time data, simulations, machine learning, and reasoning to help make decisions. This digital model can be used for various purposes such as simulation, integration, testing, monitoring, and maintenance. This innovative technology is particularly valuable because they allow for continuous improvement and optimisation of the physical entity they represent.
Sector Specialist - Social Housing
How does a digital twin work in social housing?
Property management and maintenance
Through implementation and monitoring, a digital twin can create virtual replicas of properties, allowing housing associations to monitor a building’s condition in real-time; helping identify potential issues before they become major problems, ensuring timely maintenance and reducing costs.
To have a smooth implementation and monitoring processes with digital twins, we always recommend having data integration platforms. These aggregate data from various sources and ensure that all data is unified and accessible for analysis and simulation.
Energy and efficiency
Data collection can provide invaluable information during the design process and is often sourced from key technologies such as, building information models (BIM), sensors, IoT devices, and historical maintenance records.
By using real-time data, digital twins can optimise energy usage in homes, simulating different scenarios to find the most efficient ways to reduce energy consumption and lower emissions. This not only helps in achieving sustainability goals but also reduces utility bills for residents.
Compliance and safety
One thing we know to be important in social housing is meeting the standards and regulations. A digital twin makes this simple by providing detailed insights into where attention is needed. Not only does this make compliance more manageable, but allows for better engagement with stakeholders, residents, maintenance teams, and regulatory bodies.
To keep stakeholders happy, make cloud computing and user interface dashboards your best friend. Not only can you easily store the large amounts of data provided by a digital twin, but you can enable remote access to the digital twin, allowing stakeholders to interact with it and see real-time data from anywhere.
Resident experience
With the implementation of real time data, through simulation analysis, digital twins can improve the overall resident experience. The real-time information means it is possible to identify changes in behaviour that might impact your residents' way of living, encouraging more sustainable living practices and enhance the quality of life for residents.
One way to assist you in enhancing resident experience is to use artificial intelligence and machine learning. The data provided by AI and ML can identify patterns, predict future issues, and optimise operations; enhancing the decision-making process and improve the efficiency of property management.
Retrofitting and renovation
Once again, the data provided by a digital twin provides an array of information which tells us what changes need to be made and where. This is beneficial for social housing organisations because they can identify the best strategies for upgrading homes to improve energy efficiency and reduce carbon footprints, while also considering the wellbeing of vulnerable residents.
IoT sensors and actuators are essential here because they can collect real-time data from the physical environment, such as temperature, humidity, energy usage, and structural integrity.
Get in touch
If you are looking for more interesting and exciting ways to innovate your business processes and push the boundaries on data analysis, contact our innovation team at innovation@waterstons.com.
Or for more information on how we can support your social housing organisation, email our sector specialist andrew.buckels@waterstons.com.