Evaluating the Integration of Technical Building Equipment Information Handling into Digital Twins Across the Entire Lifecycle Using Industry 4.0 AAS and IFC Models

The building industry requires an integrated information model capable of accommodating both static data from the design and construction stages and dynamic data (such as sensor streams and control signals) during operation. Over nearly three decades of development, the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) standard has become the de‑facto backbone of BIM software for design and construction, producing a vast corpus of building data in IFC files; yet the absence of an official API hampers real‑time read/write access. By contrast, the Industry 4.0 Asset Administration Shell (AAS) provides an API specification and native mappings to protocols such as MQTT and OPC UA, although it has not yet been widely adopted in the building domain. By comparing model layers, attribute‑attachment mechanisms, property types, and API capabilities, this study demonstrates that IFC components can be remapped to AAS. An initial mapping is presented for the core mechanisms and the six basic IFC data types to their corresponding AAS DataElement. The findings suggest that a hybrid strategy, employing IFC during design and construction and rewriting the as‑built model into AAS for the operational phase, offers the most pragmatic pathway toward a lifecycle‑wide digital twin for buildings. Future works may include a detailed one‑to‑one mapping between the two standards, the formulation of rule‑based translation logic, and the development of an automated tool that converts IFC data into AAS instances.