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Technology for the soft implementing a digital twin into the IoT HVAC control loop

The development of application software for cyber-physical systems of buildings involves the widespread use of Internet of Things (IoT) integration platforms. In practice, the flexible functionality of IoT platforms often leads to additional costs for software enhancement of existing and connection of new units, in particular digital twins. The paper proposes a technological solution for the implementation of a digital twin of the ventilation process in the IoT control loop of heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems for buildings and industrial facilities. The implementation and execution of the digital twin in the form of a dynamic simulation model in the object-oriented modelling language Modelica in the OpenModelica environment is considered. The IoT platform InfluxData, based on the TICK stack, is considered as an example of an integration environment. It is a horizontally-oriented IoT platform that contains the mechanism for collecting data from devices and the InfluxDB time-series database for storing metrics. To integrate simulation models on Modelica with InfluxDB, an OMPython server is proposed. In this case, the integration scripts are executed in the Python language, which as a result extends the traditional capabilities of the IoT platform significantly to the level of a digitally twinned control system. This HVAC control involves adapting control loops by taking into account the dynamics of the air distribution process over the ventilation network, evaluating and compensating for process inertia. The publication was prepared within the framework of the Academic Fund Program at the HSE University in 2020–2021 (grant № 21-04-039). Read more...