Zahra Ghorbani is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Architectural Engineering at Penn State. Her research focuses on defining and leveraging Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) and Digital Twins (DTs) for capital facilities’ operations. She is also the Vice Chair of the NIBS Digital Twin Integration (DTI) subcommittee. Together with the other chairs, she is leading this national effort to establish the relationship between BIM and DTs. Moreover, she is the BIM manager at the Penn State office of physical plant. She monitors the execution of BIM on capital projects and works on improving the BIM standards at Penn State. Before joining Penn State, she received a B.E. in architectural engineering from Shahid Beheshti University in Iran and thereafter relocated to the United States to complete her M.S. in construction management at Texas A&M University. Her master's research focused on using deep neural networks for oil spill detection and segmentation.
The Architecture, Engineering, Construction, and Operations (AECO) industry lags behind other industries in adopting digitalization. There is an opportunity to leverage Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) in building operations to reduce energy consumption. Developing CPSs to support the operation of buildings and infrastructure will lead to more sustainable built environments by creating more efficient energy management systems. This research focuses on technologies, processes, and systems that enable CPS through a systems approach, including intelligent and parametric digital models of buildings using building information modeling (BIM) and digital twins. A structure was developed to move from digital models to BIM, to CPSs. In addition, CPS operational use cases were grouped based on similarities, and a taxonomy was developed to structure them. Future research includes expanding the developed taxonomy to incorporate the CPS AECO use cases in the design and construction phases and developing a procedure to guide organizations in creating and implementing CPSs.