Funded by: Federal Institute for Research on Building, Urban Affairs and Spatial Development at the Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning

Project duration: 01/2023 - 06/2025

Building product traceability is of great importance for the sustainability of a building, especially when considering how the building will be treated at the end of its life cycle. Traceability makes it possible to understand and assess the origin and environmental impact of the building materials used. This is important to ensure that the building is constructed, operated and ultimately deconstructed responsibly and sustainably.

In industries such as healthcare, retail and automotive, concepts for data consistency and product traceability along the information supply chain have been successfully established. These concepts have also been studied in the construction and real estate industry for many years, but often break down at the transition to the end customer.

The research project "BIM and IoT-based traceability of construction products" aims to develop a holistic concept for data consistency and traceability of construction products. As part of the project, a labeling system is being developed to uniquely label and link construction products and planned virtual objects. The BIM (Building Information Modeling) method and the Internet of Things (IoT) will be used to facilitate the feasibility of building product traceability. The aim is to link the as-planned model with the digital building product twins (including manufacturer, identification, product property, logistics and event information) as a so-called as-built model.

The results will be validated in a real test environment and presented to the public using a demonstrator in the BIM laboratory at the University of Wuppertal.