Digital Twin-Based Energy Management and Irrigation Optimization of PV-Powered Smart Agriculture Systems Using IoT Soil Monitoring

Agriculture is increasingly challenged by water scarcity, climate change, and rising energy demands, requiring more efficient and sustainable irrigation solutions. Conventional irrigation systems often lack the capability to adapt their operation to changing soil conditions and renewable energy availability, resulting in inefficient water and energy use. This study proposes a digital twin-based framework for energy management and irrigation optimization in photovoltaic (PV)-powered smart agriculture systems using Internet of Things (IoT) soil monitoring. The proposed system integrates a physical irrigation infrastructure, an IoT monitoring network, a fuzzy logic control layer, and a digital twin environment that periodically synchronizes the virtual model with IoT measurements to support the system representation and decision-making. The digital twin models soil moisture, temperature, nutrient levels, PV energy generation, battery state of charge, and irrigation water consumption. The virtual representation was periodically aligned with the physical system using measurements transmitted through the long-range (LoRa)-based network. An energy-aware irrigation scheduling strategy was developed to optimize irrigation timing based on soil conditions, battery status, and solar energy availability. The framework was evaluated using field data collected in a real apple orchard through an ESP32-based IoT platform and a standalone PV-powered irrigation system; quantitative experimental validation was performed for the soil twin. The results demonstrate high soil twin synchronization accuracy, with an overall RMSE of 1.47 percentage points and R2 of 0.981, based on experimental field measurements. The energy twin and irrigation twin were evaluated using experimentally acquired sensor data together with model-based performance assessment, demonstrating the potential of the proposed digital twin framework for integrated water–energy management in smart agriculture.