The Digital Twins and Energy Efficiency: A Bibliometric Analysis on Indoor Thermal Comfort of Buildings

Global warming threatens basic human life, significantly impacting the climate due to human activities and building energy use, increasing carbon footprint. Rapid growth in urban population and urbanisation increases the demand for energy, contributing to continuous Greenhouse gas emissions. It represents a significant threat to climate globally and indoor thermal conditions may fluctuate significantly due to abrupt changes in ambient thermal conditions. This could make the occupants uncomfortable and impact to higher utilisation of cooling system. This paper highlights the idea of the real-time possibility of indoor thermal monitoring, whereas a Digital Twin is a virtual representation of a physical asset that is used in experiments or simulations to forecast behaviour and aid decision-makers. Therefore, the main objective of this bibliometric analysis is to analyse the research on Digital Twins and energy efficiency with a focus on Indoor Thermal Comfort, using the Scopus database. Suitable keywords were chosen to filter the data and then analysed as per different criteria such as the number of articles published by an author, the number of citations, institutions producing a greater number of articles, Journals producing the great number of publications, categorization of scientific documents, and most prolific countries in terms of publications. Results revealed Zhang Yan as the most prolific author, China as the leading country in publications, and “Energies” as the top journal. Despite the growing research interest over the past five years, DTs are expected to be crucial in future industry advancements, especially in construction, as evidenced by their increasing productivity.