Daiwa House Industry Co., Ltd.

Daiwa House Industry Co., Ltd. is engaged in a wide range of businesses, from detached houses to rental housing, condominiums, commercial/business facilities, along with an Environmental and Energy Business. The company promotes Building Information Modeling (BIM), which uses three-dimensional data to improve productivity in the design, construction, and maintenance of buildings and structures. As part of this effort, the company's General Technology Laboratory used Amazon Web Services (AWS) to visualize factory equipment by combining Digital Twin and IoT using 3D data from its own factory equipment.

Daiwa House Industry was founded on the philosophy of "industrialization of construction." The company is active in a wide range of business areas, including detached houses, rental housing, condominiums, commercial facilities, distribution facilities, medical and nursing care facilities, and an environmental and energy business, supplying 1.87 million housing units, 45,000 commercial facilities, and 9,000 silver facilities. They are also involved in the revitalization of detached houses and apartment complexes, including remodeling and purchase and resale business.

The company, which aims to achieve sales of 10 trillion yen by 2055, began research on the use of Building Information Modeling (BIM) in 2006, aiming to improve productivity through BIM as a growth strategy. In the year of 2018, Daiwa House is promoting the use of BIM throughout the company with the architectural innovation project "D's BIM."

As part of this data utilization effort, the company also developed the concept of a "Housing API" to allow third parties to develop applications that can manage multiple devices in a home. In the year of 2017, a smart home demonstration using AWS IoT services and other services to enable a residential API was conducted with the help of AWS partner Fuji Soft, Inc. In addition, from 2019–20, Daiwa House has embarked on a project to apply this technology to the maintenance and operation of factory equipment using BIM.

Mr. Hiroyuki Yoshida of the IT Solution Group, Housing Technology Research Department, General Technology Research Institute, Daiwa House Industry Co., Ltd. who was also in charge of the smart home demonstration experiment, said, "We wanted to add value to the BIM data by digitally twinning the factory management status with 3D data created with BIM, and then installing various sensors in the factory for facility management combined with IoT."

This project began when Toray Industries, Inc. was selected for a research project by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO), a national research and development corporation, and asked Daiwa House Industry to utilize sensors in large-scale spaces. The main objective of the project is to demonstrate the feasibility of a system that can remotely control lighting on/off and other aspects of the facility to create and maintain comfort by understanding spatial information at Daiwa House Industry's Nara No. 4 Plant, where Toray sensors have been installed.

Twenty-four sensors (illumination, temperature, humidity, human presence) were installed in the factory building and office building with a 125m x 100m span, and information acquired from each sensor was sent to the cloud via AWS IoT service, and collected and analyzed in the cloud. The results are visualized on a digital twin with BIM data that can be managed from remote PCs, smartphones, and other devices.

Fuji Soft was in charge of the data transmission to the cloud and the construction of the cloud-side system, and a plan was adopted to aggregate data using a serverless architecture centered on AWS IoT Greengrass.

“Until now, the latest IT technology has not been utilized in the control technology of factory equipment. Physical wiring work is also complicated, and even a slight change in location requires rewiring. For this reason, we decided to place four distribution boards in the factory and link them together on a cloud server. We thought that by attaching a controller to one unit, collecting data, and uploading it to the cloud, we could reduce wiring installation costs and accommodate changes in equipment layout," said Mr. Yoshida.

The AWS solution was selected based on its high global market share as well as the reliability gained from the 2017 smart home demonstration. The decision was also supported by Fuji Soft's proposal for a variety of services that would be useful for this project. The use of AWS IoT Greengrass also has the advantage of being able to remotely control the updates of the software itself that is linked to it.

Fuji Soft accumulated know-how on the effective use of AWS serverless and managed services since the development of the smart home and drafted a proposal that optimized not only functionality but also cost. This time, Amazon DynamoDB, a managed service, is used for the database, and AWS Lambda is used for sensor data acquisition/analysis/visualization and lighting device control processing.

“Even if the hassle of physical wiring is eliminated, the high cost of wireless communications and cloud services is meaningless. We utilize a variety of AWS technologies to enable cost-effective remote management," said Mr. Yoshida.

This project started in April, 2019. After detailed verification, the AWS environment was built over a three-month period from July to September 2020. One of the reasons for the short time required to build the system was the serverless architecture of AWS, which allowed us to efficiently develop the necessary functions to meet demand. Mr. Yoshida evaluated that “We were able to leave the uploading of data to the cloud to our existing AWS service. Building this from scratch would have been quite difficult. We value realization of the benefits and speed of the cloud.”

“Through this project, we have learned that converting BIM data to 3D requires a larger data volume and slows down the operation of the system”, Mr. Yoshida said, "We have actually tried so-called digital twinning, and we have found various issues. We hope to continue to accumulate and share our know-how through various projects in the future.”

Conventional building control-related systems, once installed, are used for five to ten years, and can operate reliably for as long as 20 years. On the other hand, new services are constantly emerging from companies like AWS, and existing services are constantly being updated. We believe that ongoing response to these changes will also be necessary in the future.

In addition, conventional building control systems are very expensive to install and use and may not be available for small to medium-sized buildings. Daiwa House Industry is involved not only in large-scale facilities such as factories and distribution centers but also in small- and medium-scale buildings, so they have high expectations that the latest IT technologies such as AWS can be used in this area as well.

Mr. Yoshida said, “If we can centralize facility management, we will be able to remotely manage facilities across the country and overseas by experts in a small number of locations. When we look to the future, the existence of AWS, which can be used worldwide, is very reassuring."