A Digital Twin-based Smart Home: A Proof of Concept Study

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the feasibility of integrating Digital Twin technology into smart homes, enabling real-time analysis, simulation, and automation to improve energy efficiency and comfort through two practical use cases.

Contribution

It presents the first implementation of Digital Twin concepts in smart home environments, showcasing two practical use cases for energy monitoring and thermal comfort optimization.

Findings

Digital Twin can effectively visualize energy consumption data.

Simulation-based control can optimize heating schedules.

Two-way communication enhances smart home automation.

Abstract

A Digital Twin is a virtual system that can fully describe a physical one. It constantly receives data from its counterpart's sensors, consults external sources, and obtains manual inputs from its stakeholders. The DT uses all this information to make various computations, such as analyses, predictions, and simulations, and then possibly sends the results back to the physical system. Domotics, or Smart Home Technologies, brings intelligence and comfort to a house by automating some of its functions. Although the research on both themes is vast, there are few implementations of Smart Homes based on Digital Twin technologies, and this work aims to prove that residences can also benefit from this concept. We implement two different use cases showing that a two-way connection between a home and its virtual counterpart can provide its owners with analyses and simulation-based automation. The first study case allows the user to visualize their home appliances' past and present state concerning their energy consumption. Based on heating simulations, the second determines the best time to turn on a heater to increase the home's thermal comfort and reduce energy usage.