Eduard Loscos is a Research and Development Manager at the IDP Group (Bureau Veritas), President of the Building Digital Twin Association, and Honorary Professor at the School of Computing, Engineering and Digital Technologies, Teesside University. Mr Loscos holds a BSc in Physics (UAB), a Master’s in Environmental Engineering, and a Postgraduate degree in Quantum Engineering (UPC). With over 25 years of experience in business development across multiple sectors, including programming, printing, optoelectronics, technology transfer, and the AECOO industry, he has participated in more than 25 Horizon Europe projects, coordinating three of them. His work focuses particularly on the digitalisation of the construction sector. Currently, he serves as Convenor of CEN/TC 442/WG9, leading European standardisation activities in the field of digital twins for the built environment.

BUILD UP (BUP): Drawing on your experience with EU energy efficiency policy, how would you assess the current state of building energy data in Europe in relation to the level of quality, consistency, and coverage required for the effective implementation of the EPBD? In particular, what are the most critical data gaps affecting the preparation and credibility of National Building Renovation Plans, and how can Member States strengthen their data foundations to ensure these plans are realistic, well-targeted, and measurable over time? 

EDUARD LOSCOS (EL):  From my perspective, Europe has put in place a strong and coherent  Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) policy framework, but the underlying building energy data still falls short of the level of quality, consistency, and coverage required for its effective and credible implementation.  Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) databases remain the primary evidence base across Member States, yet they were designed for certification and compliance, not for strategic planning, monitoring, and long-term steering. They rely on heterogeneous assumptions, lack full traceability of calculation and simulation choices, and are weakly connected to real operational performance. The most critical gap for National Building Renovation Plans (NBRPs) is the absence of commonly governed standards for building energy simulation, which makes renovation impact estimates difficult to reproduce, compare, and audit across countries and over time. This is compounded by limited interoperability between EPCs, permits (including digital building permits (DBPs)), renovation records, building information modelling (BIM) data, and energy use data, as well as insufficient coverage of Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems and actual renovation events. To make NBRPs realistic, well-targeted, and measurable, Member States should establish national reference frameworks for simulation and modelling, ideally framed through Asset Digital Twins (ADTws) along the full lifecycle and tightly linked to public digital building logbooks. In parallel, interoperability must be anchored in an EU-level Construction Data Space, where initiatives such as CONSTRUCTION-X and  GreenBIMxels can provide concrete implementation pathways, supported by shared semantics through tools like the EC3 Built Environment Ontology Lookup Service or even our BDTA Ontology Catalogue. Data and simulation governance under ADTw may well be treated as a core public infrastructure for EPBD delivery.

‘The most critical gap for National Building Renovation Plans (NBRPs) is the absence of commonly governed standards for building energy simulation’

BUP: As President of the Building Digital Twin Association (BDTA), how would you assess the current maturity and uptake of digital twins in the construction sector? How can digital twins evolve from technical tools into strategic data governance instruments for the construction and buildings sector?

EL: We have a clear roadmap based on the standardisation under the CEN Technical Committee (CEN/TC) 442, which will allow not only broad consensus among all the National Standardisation Bodies (NSB) under the CEN umbrella but also getting a full harmonisation with the previous work under ISO EN 19650. Moreover, liaisons with other groups, such as ISO JTC1/SC41, allow the establishment of a framework for ADTws that will persist over time. Following this, the initial part of the roadmap has been the development and publication of the Technical Report Building Information Modelling - Digital Twins Applied to the Built Environment - Use Cases (UNE CEN/TR 18077:2024) to better understand the benefits of the application of digital twins (DTws) in the built environment, as well as the recently approved CEN EN 18162: Building information modelling - Digital twins applied to the built environment - Concept and definitions, which has received 100% positive votes from all the NSBs. Moreover, one new working item is in the pipeline to address the maturity levels as well as the linkage of ADTw with Digital Product Passports (DPPs), Smart Readiness Indicators (SRIs), DBPs, DBLs, and the three axes of future development were already set in terms of interoperability, creation and use of synthetic data and last but not least, ethics and security.
 

BUP: With the growing volume and diversity of building-related data, from EPCs and cadastral records to IoT, remote sensing, and EU-funded project outputs, what role can digital twins play in integrating diverse data sources and improving the management, quality, and usability of building data across governance levels?

EL: DTws are a crossroad of information along the lifecycle of the target entity, in this case, a built asset, thus linking related stakeholders along its lifecycle. Therefore, they have a central role to play in integrating the rapidly growing volume and diversity of building-related data, precisely because they provide a structuring logic rather than just a data container. By design, a DTw can act as a reference framework that links EPCs, cadastral data, BIM models, Internet of Things (IoT) streams, inspection reports, renovation records, and outputs from EU-funded projects into a coherent, lifecycle-oriented information model. Crucially, this integration only becomes scalable and able to be aggregated when DTws are underpinned by common information models, ontologies, and explicit semantics, allowing data from different sources and governance levels to be interpreted consistently. When implemented correctly, DTws improve not only data integration but also data quality, by making assumptions explicit, enabling validation against operational data, and supporting versioning and provenance tracking. This makes them particularly powerful instruments for public authorities seeking to move from fragmented datasets to evidence-based planning, monitoring, and policy evaluation.

‘When implemented correctly, digital twins improve not only data integration, but also data quality, by making assumptions explicit, enabling validation against operational data, and supporting versioning and provenance tracking’

BUP: As the buildings sector moves toward greater digitalisation and given that the EPBD recast promotes harmonised databases, interoperability, and stronger data governance across the buildings sector, how can digital twins support interoperability between existing data sources and tools, and what conditions are needed for their effective uptake at the EU and national level?

EL: As mentioned before, ADTw should link many datasets and are also expected to be aggregated, so based on what the EPBD recast already points toward, it is clear that they can act as the technical and semantic bridge between existing tools and data sources by producing harmonised databases, interoperability, and stronger data governance across the buildings sector. However, right now there are too many interpretations of what a DTw is and what it is for. Moreover, parallel initiatives must converge first to avoid work duplication so, for example, it is necessary to clarify the boundaries between ADTws and DBLs. Are DBLs the digital thread of the ADTw or just part of it? Should we include simulation-based synthetic time series data in the DBLs too?

Considering all this, and in addition to these clarifications at the conceptual level, it is expected that, rather than replacing EPC systems, BIM tools, or national registers, digital twins can federate them through standardised interfaces, shared semantics, and lifecycle-based information structures. For this to work at the EU and national level, several conditions must be met, including clear alignment with European standardisation (notably CEN/TC 442), adoption of open and reusable ontologies, and deployment within a Construction Data Space architecture that supports secure, sovereign, and purpose-driven data sharing. Without these conditions, DTws risk remaining isolated solutions; with them, they can become the backbone of interoperable, EPBD-compliant data ecosystems.
 

BUP: The deployment of DTws in the buildings sector requires new skills, roles, and ways of working across the value chain, from public administrations and designers to facility managers and building owners. From your perspective, what skills and organisational capacities are currently missing, and how can training initiatives, professional standards, and EU knowledge platforms help ensure that digital twins are effectively used in everyday building design, renovation, and operation?

EL: The deployment of DTws in the buildings sector requires new skills and organisational capacities across the whole value chain, with the biggest gaps today in standardised information management, semantic interoperability, and simulation governance, it is clear that not just a ‘using tools’ approach will be enough right now. As it was emphasised in the BDTA foundational H2020 SPHERE Whitepaper in 2019, ADTw are in need of clearly defined roles that make responsibilities explicit along the lifecycle. At that time, we proposed three clear roles that could be adapted to the size of the asset. In an airport, these roles may be shared among a well-manned staff, but in a residential house it would be just one person taking all the roles. The roles proposed and that remain valid were the BDT Manager, the BDT Configuration Manager, and the BDT Simulation Manager, to ensure that configuration control, traceability, and simulation-based services are governed consistently along the asset lifespan. Beyond this, the UK National Digital Twin programme identifies 20 roles, with some brand new, based on the 2022 publications from the Centre for Digital Built Britain (CDBB).

Encouragingly, since 2023 some dedicated postgraduate training programmes have emerged in the EU targeting complementary skills in existing profiles, including executive/master-level programmes such as Universidad Politécnica de Madrid’s Digital Twins offer for infrastructures/cities, Sapienza University of Rome’s master on Construction Digital Twin and AI, and Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya’s postgraduate course on BDTs for buildings.

Beyond all this, and to scale up uptake, the standardisation of these roles and the associated capacities will be essential. Educational efforts must be aligned with European standardisation activities, most notably the work underway in CEN/TC 442/WG8 – Competence, led by Angelo Ciribini from the University of Brescia, where these profiles are expected to be incorporated into the forthcoming standards pipeline. This alignment is crucial to translate education and training into procurement-ready professional requirements, ensuring that digital twins move beyond isolated innovation pilots and become an operational practice in permitting, renovation, and facility management across Europe.