Climate‑Driven Digital Twin Wind Assessment of a GDR Heritage Building

Changes in wind intensity and directional patterns due to climate change, combined with many buildings nearing their design life, make it vital to assess and diagnose their condition for expected and extreme hazards. Real-time structural monitoring is an emerging technology under development, but current equipment is specialized, costly, and often operates as proprietary black-boxes requiring dedicated software. The digital twin (DT) concept, a virtual replica of a physical asset continuously updated with real-time data, supports Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) and decision-making. This work explores enhancing understanding of modern heritage GDR buildings and evolving wind hazards through a physics-informed DT methodology. The Jakobsplan student residence in Weimar, an 11-story precast building from 1970-1972, serves as a “real-life laboratory” for validating DT technology. After interdisciplinary consultations, comprehensive data was gathered to establish the digital infrastructure. Sensors (Thingy:53) measure accelerations in three directions at 400 Hz, transmitting data via BLE to a Raspberry Pi acting as a remote acquisition unit. An IoT protocol, MQTT, manages data transfer with storage in a database. Similar protocols integrate weather station data on wind velocity and direction. A BIM model in Revit serves as base geometry for a finite element model simulating structural behavior from weather data. Virtual models update in real time based on SHM data, with Unity enabling DT visualization. This infrastructure enables post-processing, analysis, and weather forecasting to support data-driven decisions that identify patterns, detect abnormalities, and define expected building behavior under evolving wind hazards