Building of the future: from digital twins to AI agents for data-smart operation
Buildings generate vast quantities of operational data, yet most of it remains trapped in disconnected systems and beyond the reach of the people who manage them. This presentation explores how semantic digital building twins, which give operational data shared meaning and structure, are becoming the foundation for a new generation of AI agents capable of overseeing building operations. Moving beyond dashboards and conventional BMS workflows, we will show how agents reason over a building's semantic model to detect faults, verify performance against design intent, and support asset and portfolio decisions, with live demonstrations drawn from research at UCL and its commercial translation through Tacit Analytics. We will examine what it takes to create these semantic foundations at scale, the technologies that make agentic operation practical today, and what this shift means for how buildings will be managed, operated, and valued.
Session Speaker
Dimitrios Rovas is Professor of Building Simulation and Optimisation at the Bartlett School of Environment, Energy and Resources, University College London, where he developed and leads the MSc in Smart Buildings and Digital Engineering and heads the corresponding research team. He has spent the last fifteen years researching smart buildings, with a focus on computational approaches to energy modelling, semantic data integration, and the middleware that turns building data into operational intelligence. He received his PhD in Mechanical Engineering from MIT and previously held academic posts at the University of Paris VI, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Technical University of Crete. He has led more than twenty major research projects advancing data-driven platforms for building operation, and co-led the International Energy Agency's Annex 81 on Data-Driven Smart Buildings, a collaboration spanning nineteen countries. He is co-founder and
chairman of Tacit Analytics, a UCL spinout developing reusable AI agents for smart buildings and building decision-making, where research on semantic digital twins is being translated into commercial practice.
