Preserving Visual Comfort in Office Spaces: Utilizing Digital Building Twins A proof-of-concept case study leveraging both measurement data and occupant feedback to preserve visual comfort

This study aimed to use the digital twin (DT) technology to create an ideal work environment by
preservation of visual. A fundamental DT architecture is presented to determine visual comfort and
light conditions in office environments. A DT has been developed by storing objective measurements
of sensors and subjective measurements of feedback of occupants in timeseries databases and linking
those to the virtual model with the linked data approach. The current research gap in the application
of digital twins for combining visual comfort indices such as glare with sensorial measurements in
buildings have been reviewed in this study. By studying the existing visual comfort metrices and the
effects of visual comfort on human’s well-being and performances, it highlights the potentials for
enhancement in the digitalization in the built environment. The developed DT links comfort levels to
illuminance values, glare perception to measured daylight glare probability (DGP) and luminance levels
to brightness perceptions. Besides, it also incorporates the daylight perception and the meteorological
data.
For the creation of the DT, a fully operational university building on the university of Eindhoven has
been used. Leveraging digital twins for monitoring the case study resulted in having convenient insights
in the visual comfort of the occupants and access to the lighting measurement data. It supports the
identification of spaces where occupants are visually uncomfortable and detect spaces where
illuminance values below 500 Lux or above 750 Lux are measured. The output of the entire solution is
displayed in a web-based tool to enable viewing the model and interactions. It opens possibilities for
more innovative applications in the indoor environmental quality domain.