IoT sensors in cultural heritage buildings for real-time BIM-based information management

The production of BIM models of heritage constructions opens a broad road of opportunities for integrated data management in day-to-day operation of asset, covering several interesting aspects, such as conservation and predictive/corrective maintenance, room usage, asset tracking amongst others. However, in the same way as new buildings are becoming more and more self-monitored, so can heritage buildings, through wireless and low-consumption devices for such purposes based on the widespread existence of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. This is still a topic that has deserved little attention in the literature because of the inherent pluridisciplinarity that it carries and requires. The proposed method is comprised of three main components: IoT system, relational database, and BIM. The first component, the IoT system, is a smartboard associated with a microcontroller. The microcontroller is used to communicate air temperature, pressure, humidity, and gas resistance data in individual rooms. The smartboard is connected to temperature and humidity sensors for collecting the environmental data. The time interval of saving sensor data in a database can be increased or decreased by a user as required. The microcontroller can also host a variety of wireless communication protocols (e.g., Bluetooth, ZigBee, and Wi-Fi). The second component is a relational database developed in the MySQL environment to house and update the captured sensors data. The microcontroller can be coded to store and transfer sensors data to the database at predetermined time intervals. The third component is the BIM-based model of a building. The BIM model is used as a central model to visualize and monitor the environmental data of rooms remotely and increase the monitoring process’s speed.