This paper presents contributions of the ANR McBIM (Communicating Material for BIM) project regarding Digital Building Twins, specifically how Semantic Web technologies allow providing explainable decision-support. Following an introduction stating our understanding of a Digital Building Twin (DBT), namely a lively representation of a buildings' status and environment, we identify five main research domains following the study of main research issues related to DBT. We then present the state-of-the-art and existing standards for digitizing the construction process, Semantic Web technologies, and wireless sensor networks. We further position the main contributions made so far in the ANR McBIM project's context according to this analysis, e.g., sensor placement in the communicating material and explainable decision-support.

This article presents the design of communicating materials and their application to sensing communicating concrete for construction industry. After presenting the concept of communicating materials and its issues in the context of the construction and structure health monitoring, this article depicts the main contributions made so far in the physical development of a communicating concrete expected to be functional more than three decades. To obtain it, a specific cyber-physical architecture is proposed, using a two-level wireless sensor network with sensing and communicating nodes (CN). To maximize the lifetime of the communicating concrete, the energy conservation problem is improved with two proposals: an original energy harvesting system using wireless power transfer for embedded sensing nodes and analytical estimation models for predicting energy consumption of the CN network.