Digital Twin (DT) in Smart Energy Systems - Systematic Literature Review of DT as a growing solution for Energy Internet of the Things (EIoT)

Abstract

In the industry 4.0 era, the Smart Energy System (SES) should be able to address the emerging challenges of digitization and socioeconomic/ecologic transition along with other critical entities of the society. However, because of the complexity of this system, both researchers and practitioners are seeking an agile and smart solution. The main motive of this review is to investigate the applications and implementation of Digital Twin (DT) in the provision of energy services. Research Questions (RQ) of this study include: RQ1: What are the applications of DT in SES and how effective is DT in that use case of EIoT? RQ2: Which issues of an SES can be addressed efficiently by using DT? Through answering the mentioned questions, the current study is heading to following objectives (O), O1: Describe the state of the art of DT in SES. O2: Develop a direction for energy 4.0 management through listing the applications, challenges and important factors of implementing DTs. O3: Provide a list of various approaches in employing DT in the scope of SES. The current study is a systematic literature review (SLR), based on SCOPUS, WOS and IEEE digital libraries. Two keywords (namely “Digital Twin” and “Energy Systems”) have been first used. To achieve the final list of articles, 2 levels of screening have been conducted. The first Screening was based on the relevance of the results concerning research objectives. The second screening was an abstract study. The exclusion/inclusion criteria in the abstract study were based on the research questions. The papers that have the potential of answering one of the research questions have been included. Since the implementation of DT is a rather new topic, both backward snowballing and forward snowballing strategies are implemented to finalize the article selection phase. 60 articles identified by searching through scientific databases and 11 articles have been appended to the list during the snowballing process. The results of the current review provide a managerial guideline for practitioners that are heading to utilize DT, along with an anthology of DT within SES scope to feed possible future studies.