Mixed Reality-based Digital Twinning of Building Circularity: A Co-Design Approach for Sustainable Buildings

Sustainability in construction practices is becoming the need of the day, and the construction sector is getting adoptive to the integration of digital tools to explore the opportunities for enhancing sustainability and circular economy applications, offering significant benefits to both industry and society. To achieve this goal, this article discusses a sustainability framework combining Digital Twin (DT), Mixed Reality (MR), and Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) to align with circular economy principles in building construction. A case study of a single-family house in Kelowna, BC, Canada is conducted to demonstrate the potential of this integration for comprehensive LCA of buildings. The LCA analysis of the building is performed using OneClick LCA- an LCA platform. The results of LCA account for the embodied carbon, improved material circularity, life cycle cost efficiency, etc. A DT Dashboard (DTD) of the building’s circularity model is also developed, which monitors and optimizes the whole life cycle of the building. The DTD is then deployed to MR hardware - Microsoft HoloLens for enabling onsite circularity analysis of the building. This not only allows for immersive visualization of LCA data but also enhances stakeholders’ collaboration and decision-making. This way the study showcases how immersive DT can potentially be a game-changer for sustainable construction and provides an industrially replicable model.