Digital Twin for DCs: A Reference Architecture Based on BIM, IoT and Analytics Control

Authors: Silvia Meschini, Paola Gasbarri, Lavinia Chiara Tagliabue, Viviana Vaccaro, Robert Birke, Marco Aldinucci.

Abstract: Data centers (DCs) represent one of the most energy-intensive and operationally critical categories of buildings, supporting essential digital services such as cloud computing, large-scale data storage, and artificial intelligence applications. Their operation is characterized by complex interdependencies between information technology loads, cooling infrastructures, power distribution systems, and environmental conditions. Ensuring efficiency, reliability, and resilience under these constraints remains a significant challenge for operators and designers alike. In recent years, the concept of Digital Twin (DT) has emerged as a promising paradigm to address this complexity by enabling a continuously updated digital representation of physical systems, enriched with real-time data and analytical capabilities. Despite increasing attention in both academia and industry, DT solutions for buildings and DCs remain largely fragmented. Existing approaches often focus on individual aspects such as visualization, simulation, or monitoring dashboards, while failing to provide robust integration between design data, operational measurements, and control systems. A recurring limitation concerns the lack of interoperability between Building Information Modeling (BIM) data and Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructures, which prevents the construction of coherent and scalable DT systems. This paper proposes a reference architecture for DT applied to DCs, grounded in the integration of BIM-based representations, real-time IoT data acquisition, analytical models, and control mechanisms. The architecture adopts a layered perspective, separating concerns related to data management, semantic integration, modeling, analytics, and actuation, while maintaining consistency across these layers. Informed by recent reviews on building-scale DT, the proposed approach addresses the well-known bottlenecks associated with BIM usage and data acquisition. The contribution of this work lies in providing an architectural blueprint able to support interoperability and reuse, offering a structured foundation for the development of advanced DT solutions in DC environments, and complemented by practical metrics that make DT implementations assessable beyond project-specific prototypes.

Keywords: Digital Twin, DCs, BIM, IFC, IoT, Reference Architecture, Smart Buildings; HPC