The integrated masterplan approach marks a change in the traditional physical-first, digital-later approach to building infrastructure. When the digital infrastructure is left as an afterthought, it gives rise to many challenges in system integration efforts afterwards. To ensure maximum interoperability with current systems, the ODP uses Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) and Building Information Model (BIM) technologies, common communication protocols and open data schemas.
Efficient integration and system-to-system interoperability by leveraging the ODP facilitates the seamless provision of new and innovative estate services such as robotic systems and independent system-to-system operations in last-mile robot delivery. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AIML) models optimise energy consumption, utilisation of in-building amenities and vertical transport services in ODP-enabled districts. Data collected by Internet of Things (IoT) sensors throughout the estate ingested by the ODP allow for this.

The ODP was deployed in 2021 – and is currently operational at the JTC’s headquarters, the JTC Summit, which has seen the successful functional integration of five building hard systems – elevator system, escalator system, building ACMV, and access control and security systems – and several building services such as mail delivery, electric vehicle charging stations, meeting room occupancy, and temperature monitoring and control. The ODP will be deployed to Singapore’s first digital district located at Punggol by 2024. Building and estate systems to be integrated with ODP include pneumatic waste conveyancing, district cooling and smart energy grid systems.

The Open Digital Platform is a cross-agency collaboration which includes JTC Corporation (“JTC”), Government Technology Agency (“Govtech”), Cyber Security Agency (“CSA”), Infocomm Media Development Authority (“IMDA”) and Singapore Technologies Engineering (ST Engineering).

• Facilities and Estate Managers - Leveraging on ODP's digital twin to centralize control and monitoring of various systems, resources, and operations across the district.
• Tenants and Community - Smart services that are enabled bring about a better lifestyle (e.g. time savings, new services, convenience)
• Government - Through integration with ODP, Government would be able to use data to better deliver services, products, and smart solutions to citizens more effectively.

ODP was developed in efforts to aid Singapore in achieving its pledge to cap its emissions by 2030. Through ODP implementations in smart districts and estates, it reduces the resources consumed in the estate by approximately 30% in energy and water consumption, and 50% in facilities management manpower compared to similar estates. It also increases the satisfaction with estate services by 80% and boosts R&D development collaborations with more than 5 significant R&D projects, each >$100k using the Digital Twin of the ODP per year. With more collaboration efforts to develop smart solutions and services, ODP also opens up the generation of jobs and growth opportunities for the community and through these smart services, it can bring better living lifestyle and in turn create a greener & sustainable estate.

The current IoT landscape consists of a wide range of protocols and formats, giving rise to several key challenges: Unstructured data and multiple data formats, leading to difficulty in data correlation; High costs of integrating and implementing systems as businesses seek to compensate the perceived loss of profits incurred by opening proprietary protocols; Difficulty in holistic sense-making and operations when data is held in siloed systems. Working with incumbent systems proved to be a challenge as the older systems were either not networked or lacked digital capabilities. Building networks, systems, processes and personnel operating and managing the buildings need to undergo a digital transformation in some form to bring about a successful digitalisation of district operations and workflows. Balancing data sharing (openness) with data privacy also contributed to the list of challenges.

1. Educated Stakeholders, Partners and Users – Building networks, systems, processes and personnel operating and managing the buildings need to undergo a digital transformation in some form to bring about a successful digitalisation of district operations and workflows.
2. Support at government and national policy level – the ODP and the PDD are steered by multiple government agencies and has the backing of Singapore’s Smart Nation and Digital Government Office (SNDGO) under the Prime Minister’s Office to plan and prioritise key projects
3. This also ensures the project and platform do not stray from key outcomes, delivering the maximum value to citizens

The Open Digital Platform was deployed in 2021 and is currently operational at the JTC Corporation headquarters. Beyond the targeted implementation at PDD, there are further plans for the ODP to eventually be implemented at other JTC estates. The integrate-once, modular and reusable design approach in integrating building systems with the platform means it can be easily replicated across different estates. The open standard multi-protocol middleware framework can be adopted for a variety of projects.

Factors that would condition replication would include:

• A middleware that converts open standard protocol into the protocol the integrating platform is working on.
• A robust system and network infrastructure to support the integrating platform.
• Clarity on what data should be ingested to the integrating platform and how can the data be used for centralized monitoring and control.

The current Digital Twin is developed based on the individual estates JTC builds and currently only allows access for a single group of users. The future of the Digital Twin should be multi-user, with capabilities to integrate with multiple platforms and solutions like ESRI, Autodesk, Omniverse, and provide large enough scenes where an entire city can be loaded in for command-and-control purposes.