IBS is the biggest and best show in the residential construction industry. 67,000+ visitors from 100+ countries and 1,400+ manufacturers and suppliers attend the Builders’ Show.

Members from across the nation return to ABC’s annual convention each year to connect, celebrate and advance their businesses with the latest industry, political and technological insights. You are invited to be a part of this electric event featuring the National Craft Championships, the Construction Management Competition, the National Excellence in Construction® Awards and the Construction Workforce Awards, plus dynamic, inspiring keynote speakers, industry insight sessions and more.

In the evolving landscape of building management, transitioning from traditional systems of record to systems of insight has become crucial for sustained operational effectiveness and resilience.

This session explores the innovative application of digital twin technology from the owner’s and operator’s perspectives, underscoring its pivotal role in advancing sustainability and energy conservation within building operations.

Digital twins serve as a sophisticated tool that integrates four main data streams — hard assets, asset cutsheets, dynamic operational data, and institutional knowledge — into a unified middleware dashboard. Digital twins are 3D representations of the real-world asset and are the pathway for continued sustainability.

This integration not only simplifies the management of building data but also enhances the decision-making processes, allowing for more accurate virtual inspections and proactive maintenance strategies. By replicating physical assets in a virtual environment, digital twins enable operators to perform detailed analyses and simulations, which helps in pinpointing inefficiencies and predicting future performance under various scenarios.

This presentation will delve into the methodologies for transforming a building information model (BIM) into a navigable, asset-level digital twin. It will outline the process of data aggregation, labeling, and algorithm application, which are crucial for enhancing operational and energy efficiencies tailored to specific assets. The outcome is a streamlined, intuitive interface that not only promotes sustainability but also supports the building’s long-term viability and compliance with evolving environmental standards.

Facades+ returns with an all-new program featuring the latest developments in building enclosure design and technology on March 12th!

Everything from high-performance facades, to new iconic projects across the city and region, and strategies for increasing climate resilience and energy performance.

Please register at this link here and use your special code: NIBS20 for a 20% off discounted ticket. Additionally, AIA members can earn up to 6 AIA HSW credits at the end of the conference.

We look forward to seeing you at our upcoming Washington D.C. event!

Many building owners are starting their transition to digital twins.

There are a plethora of use cases for a digital twin, but having standardized, accurate digital models as your foundation is key to being successful. It sometimes can be challenging to know what to ask for in a model and know that you are getting one that is useful.

Come see best practices for creating your own modeling standards and ensuring you are efficiently receiving valuable models. We will discuss examples of the right and wrong ways to define these standards and go over tips and best practices. Then, we will discover ways you can perform quick model compliance checking.

View the Presentation Slides

Digital twins have emerged as a popular term in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry, often hailed as a transformative innovation. While some early adopters have embraced digital twins and invested in research and development, many facility owners are skeptical due to lack of standardized guidelines that can lead to challenges in implementation.

For this presentation, a case study approach is used to demonstrate the real-world applications of digital twins in complex facilities, such as those in the healthcare, transportation, institutional, and federal sectors. The presentation also will provide a roadmap for the AEC industry to realize the full potential of this transformative technology.

Finally, the presentation will address broader industry trends and barriers to the adoption of digital twins, including an aging workforce and a lack of shared understanding about the technology.

The Building Enclosure Council of Iowa is proud to present the 2025 BEC-Iowa Symposium. The Symposium includes a distinguished panel of speakers to discuss building science and enclosures. This will be an in-person event only, and attendees can enter a raffle to win prizes (winners will be announced at the end of the symposium). The event includes a continental breakfast, snacks, and lunch.

Date:
Thursday, March 27, 2025
8:30am - 4:00pm

Location:
Holiday Inn Des Moines - Airport Conference Center
6111 Fleur Drive, Des Moines, IA 50321

Limited Registration
$80 BEC-Iowa Members
$100 General
$25 Students

It’s no secret that there’s room for improvement when it comes to women in leadership positions across the country.

According to a piece by Forbes, women represented 58.4% of the U.S. workforce as of September 2022, but only held 35% of senior leadership positions. What’s more, Forbes reported companies with women executives are 30% more likely to outperform other companies.

Given today’s emerging technology tools – namely artificial intelligence, automation, and data analytics – women executives have increased power to drive business innovation and growth.

This is especially important, as technology continues to shape the business landscape of the built environment, and it’s important for women leaders to understand and leverage these tools to stay competitive.

In this session, Sandra Benson, Vice President, Federal Relations & Strategic Partnerships with Procore Technologies, and Nancy Novak, Chief Innovation Officer with Compass Datacenters, will discuss how to harness emerging technologies to grow business and lead change.

Rapid retrofitting of America’s existing building stock is of urgent national interest to improve energy efficiency and resilience. But how can cities plan for this significant transition with limited funding, data, resources, and time?

This session introduces a practical and scalable Urban Building stock digital twin for energy modeling developed by the Environmental Systems Lab at Cornell University. Designed to operate on widely available data, the model delivers robust, city-scale building physics models for predicting building energy use and thermal response in power outages. The digital twin platform analyzes existing energy consumption patterns. It predicts future energy consumption trends, allowing users to evaluate the impact of electrification, building retrofits, and extreme weather events on energy demand and emissions. It also enables cost and incentive modeling, helping cities and utilities assess financial feasibility and prioritize retrofit strategies. The session features a real-world case study from Ithaca, NY, the first U.S. city to commit to 100% building decarbonization and community-wide carbon neutrality. Within the session, we will provide pointers on how to scale this work to other communities.

As an increasing number of homes are built in the wildland-urban interface (WUI), it is important to understand how residential construction performs when exposed to wildland fires. WUI zones are the areas where wildland – forests, chaparral, grassland, etc., meet or mix with human development. Home hardening is a term used to describe purposeful actions taken to help protect buildings in WUI zones. Home hardening provisions within WUI codes rely on a combination of prescriptive requirements and performance requirements based on standardized tests.

In the past several years, the American Wood Council (AWC), Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety (IBHS) and the Fire Safety Research Institute (FSRI), a part of UL Research Institutes, have independently conducted multiple series of both standardized and non-standardized fire tests to quantify typical WUI fire exposures and characterize the performance of various building envelope components and assemblies under those exposures. The fire tests have been multi-faceted with individual approaches to allow for wider industry understanding of performance. FSRI’s and IBHS’s fire tests have investigated the general performance of the entire building envelope, while AWC’s tests have focused specifically on hardening measures for exterior walls, projections, and intersections between these surfaces.