A team of researchers with the Carleton Immersive Media Studio (CIMS) have won a 2025 buildingSMART International (bSI) award in the Professional Research category for their project, An Integrated Open-Source Digital Twin Platform for Federal Built Assets in Canada.
This marks the first win for a Canadian organization at the bSI awards.
As a top authority on the digital transformation of the built environment, bSI develops and maintains open standards for Building Information Modelling (BIM).
These annual awards celebrate global excellence in openBIM, recognizing projects that demonstrate innovation, collaboration and leadership. A total of nine awards were handed out, including Professional Research, which honours academic, industry and government professionals that are making valuable contributions to this evolving field.
Led by Stephen Fai, director of CIMS and professor with the Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism, the team presented their research at the bSI Summit in Berlin on September 24, alongside other finalists. Dr. Fai was joined by project co-leads Lara Chow (associate director of CIMS) and Nicolas Arellano (PhD candidate).
Competing against 129 other projects from around the world, this achievement highlights Carleton’s growing leadership in advancing digital innovation within the built environment.
“This recognition speaks to the exceptional quality and impact of the research taking place at Carleton,” said Rafik Goubran, Vice-President (Research, Innovation and International). “CIMS’ work exemplifies how our researchers are helping shape Canada’s digital future and informing global best practices.”
Enhancing the Digitization of Federal Assets
With more than 38,000 unique property assets, the Government of Canada oversees one of the largest and most complex real estate portfolios in the country.
Developed in association with the National Research Council (NRC) Canada and the Department of National Defence (DND), CIMS’ Digital Twin project employs digitized information related to the built environment — 3D models, documents, images — to enable the management of physical government assets. The ability to exchange information between mirrored digital and physical entities is what distinguishes a digital twin from a conventional model.
Future developments will look to integrate openBIM principles across the entire federal portfolio to help facilitate cross-department collaboration through unified data environments, responding to several ongoing challenges, including fragmented information systems and siloed data practices.
Further emphasizing its significance, this initiative supports key federal priorities, such as sustainability and decarbonization commitments, and smart building research. Canada’s competitive strength in this field also opens doors for future collaborations across sectors.
CIMS plans to democratize long-term access to this technology by establishing a not-for-profit to shepherd the platform in the future. The core application and code will be made available free of charge by the end of this year. Unlike proprietary digital twin solutions, it will feature open-source architecture that invites extension, integration and continuous improvement. The goal is to enable further research and development by other academic institutions and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
In addition, using the same technology, CIMS is developing a National Digital Twin in order to demonstrate the value of a national-scale, non-proprietary, browser-based digital twin platform available at no cost to all Canadians.
“This project is the culmination of more than a decade of research with funding from SSHRC, Mitacs and the New Frontiers in Research Fund. Partnerships with the Batawa Development Corporation, Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg and the Ontario East Economic Development Commission have also been instrumental in propelling our research forward,” said Stephen Fai. “We believe we now have the momentum to transform how all Canadians can access and benefit from open geospatial information.”
The bSI award comes less than a year after CIMS won top honours at the 2024 Innovation Spotlight Awards, hosted by Building Transformations.