The Internet of Things (IoT) is revolutionising how energy is delivered from energy producers and used throughout residential households. Optimising the residential energy consumption is a crucial step toward having greener and sustainable energy production. Such optimisation requires a household-centric energy management system as opposed to a one-rule-fits all approach. In this paper, we propose a data-driven multi-layer digital twin of the energy system that aims to mirror households’ actual energy consumption in the form of a household digital twin (HDT). When linked to the energy production digital twin (EDT), HDT empowers the household-centric energy optimisation model to achieve the desired efficiency in energy use. The model intends to improve the efficiency of energy production by flattening the daily energy demand levels. This is done by collaboratively reorganising the energy consumption patterns of residential homes to avoid peak demands whilst accommodating the resident needs and reducing their energy costs. Indeed, our system incorporates the first HDT model to gauge the impact of various modifications on the household energy bill and, subsequently, on energy production. The proposed energy system is applied to a real-world IoT dataset that spans over two years and covers seventeen households. Our conducted experiments show that the model effectively flattened the collective energy demand by $20.9\%$ on synthetic data and $20.4\%$ on a real dataset. At the same time, the average energy cost per household was reduced by 10.7% for the synthetic data and 17.7% for the real dataset.

Most of the buildings that exist today were built based on 2D drawings. Building information models that represent design-stage product information have become prevalent in the second decade of the 21st century. Still, it will take many decades before such models become the norm for all existing buildings. In the meantime, the building industry lacks the tools to leverage the benefits of digital information management for construction, operation, and renovation. To this end, this paper reviews the state-of-the-art practice and research for constructing (generating) and maintaining (updating) geometric digital twins. This paper also highlights the key limitations preventing current research from being adopted in practice and derives a new geometry-based object class hierarchy that mainly focuses on the geometric properties of building objects, in contrast to widely used existing object categorisations that are mainly function-oriented. We argue that this new class hierarchy can serve as the main building block for prioritising the automation of the most frequently used object classes for geometric digital twin construction and maintenance. We also draw novel insights into the limitations of current methods and uncover further research directions to tackle these problems. Specifically, we believe that adapting deep learning methods can increase the robustness of object detection and segmentation of various types; involving design intents can achieve a high resolution of model construction and maintenance; using images as a complementary input can help to detect transparent and specular objects; and combining synthetic data for algorithm training can overcome the lack of real labelled datasets.

Enormous amounts of dynamic observation and measurement data are collected from sensors in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) for the Internet of Things (IoT) applications such as environmental monitoring. However, continuous transmission of the sensed data requires high energy consumption. Data transmission between sensor nodes and cluster heads (sink nodes) consumes much higher energy than data sensing in WSNs. One way of reducing such energy consumption is to minimise the number of data transmissions. In this paper, we propose an Adaptive Method for Data Reduction (AM-DR). Our method is based on a convex combination of two decoupled Least-Mean-Square (LMS) windowed filters with differing sizes for estimating the next measured values both at the source and the sink node such that sensor nodes have to transmit only their immediate sensed values that deviate significantly (with a pre-defined threshold) from the predicted values. The conducted experiments on a real-world data show that our approach has been able to achieve up to 95% communication reduction while retaining a high accuracy (i.e. predicted values have a deviation of ±0.5 from real data values).

The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm is revolutionising the world of manufacturing into what is known as Smart Manufacturing or Industry 4.0. The main pillar in smart manufacturing looks at harnessing IoT data and leveraging machine learning (ML) to automate the prediction of faults, thus cutting maintenance time and cost and improving the product quality. However, faults in real industries are overwhelmingly outweighed by instances of good performance (faultless samples); this bias is reflected in the data captured by IoT devices. Imbalanced data limits the success of ML in predicting faults, thus presents a significant hindrance in the progress of smart manufacturing. Although various techniques have been proposed to tackle this challenge in general, this work is the first to present a framework for evaluating the effectiveness of these remedies in the context of manufacturing. We present a comprehensive comparative analysis in which we apply our proposed framework to benchmark the performance of different combinations of algorithm components using a real-world manufacturing dataset. We draw key insights into the effectiveness of each component and inter-relatedness between the dataset, the application context, and the design of the ML algorithm.

Network-enabled sensing and actuation devices are key enablers to connect real-world objects to the cyber world. The Internet of Things (IoT) consists of the network-enabled devices and communication technologies that allow connectivity and integration of physical objects (Things) into the digital world (Internet). Enormous amounts of dynamic IoT data are collected from Internet-connected devices. IoT data are usually multi-variant streams that are heterogeneous, sporadic, multi-modal, and spatio-temporal. IoT data can be disseminated with different granularities and have diverse structures, types, and qualities. Dealing with the data deluge from heterogeneous IoT resources and services imposes new challenges on indexing, discovery, and ranking mechanisms that will allow building applications that require on-line access and retrieval of ad-hoc IoT data. However, the existing IoT data indexing and discovery approaches are complex or centralised, which hinders their scalability. The primary objective of this article is to provide a holistic overview of the state-of-the-art on indexing, discovery, and ranking of IoT data. The article aims to pave the way for researchers to design, develop, implement, and evaluate techniques and approaches for on-line large-scale distributed IoT applications and services.

Large volumes of real-world observation and measurement data are collected from sensory devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) networks. IoT data is often generated in highly distributed and dynamic environments. Continuous transmission of large volumes of data collected between sensor and head/sink nodes induces a high communication cost for individual nodes. This results in a significant increase in the overall energy cost for IoT applications such as environmental monitoring. Decreasing data transmission between nodes can effectively reduce energy consumption and prolong the network lifetime, especially in battery-powered nodes/networks. In this paper, we describe an Adaptive Method for Data Reduction (AM-DR), a data reduction approach for reducing the overall data transmission and communication between sensor nodes in IoT networks such that fine-grained sensor readings can be used to reconstruct the original data within a user-defined accuracy boundary. Evaluation with real-world data shows that AM-DR achieves a communication reduction in some scenarios up to 95% while retaining a high prediction accuracy. To fully achieve the energy savings enabled by AM-DR, we provide a communication cost model. The proposed model is also integrated into the LEACH protocol to demonstrate how our proposed approach reduces energy consumption and effectively prolongs the network lifetime.