A Framework for the Integration of IoT Components into the Household Digital Twins for Energy Communities

The concept of Cognitive Household Digital Twins (CHDTs) was proposed as a mechanism to assist constituent households in Renewable Energy Communities to engage in collaborative actions that are expected to facilitate sustainable energy consumption in these communities. A CHDT represents a digital twin of a unit of physical households in a community. By integrating IoT components at the appliance level of the Physical Twin, a CHDT becomes a “living model” of its physical counterpart by receiving real-time data that reflects the households’ energy consumption or appliance use-behaviors. When CHDTs are endowed with some intelligence or cognitive abilities, they become cognizant of the operational state of the physical system using the received data. Based on these data, CHDTs can make autonomous and rational decisions on behalf of the households’ owners. Furthermore, through the integrated IoT components, CHDTs can send control signals back to connected appliances to regulate their operations. In this context, a population of CHDTs can engage in collective actions with the aim of promoting sustainable energy consumption in the ecosystem. In this work, we show how the CHDT's architectural framework enables them to collaborate. A multi-method approach that integrates systems dynamics, agent-based, and discrete event modeling techniques is used for the development of a prototype model. Several scenarios are then implemented in this environment to verify the validity of the approach.