Digital twin and metaverse-enhanced battery management for electric vehicles

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) and cyber–physical systems (CPS) are driving digital transformation and automation. An essential component of CPS is digital twin (DT) technology, which enables real-time synchronization between physical assets and their virtual counterparts. Battery management systems (BMS) in electric vehicles (EVs) face challenges in handling large volumes of sensor data, often leading to reduced accuracy in battery-state estimation. To address these challenges, DTs have been explored to aid real-time diagnosis and monitoring. One critical step toward the success of DTs is to have practical reference architectures. This paper presents proposes a novel six-layer DT architecture tailored for BMS, extending existing CPS/DT-BMS models by integrating high-fidelity electrochemical modeling, robust nonlinear state estimation, and interactive 3D visualization in a Metaverse environment. The architecture is designed with scalability in mind, supporting deployment on lightweight embedded platforms or via cloud-hosted rendering for resource-limited devices. We validate the approach using MATLAB to develop a thermally coupled SPMe-based DT of a lithium-ion NMC battery, synchronized with a virtual battery model in Unreal Engine for immersive visualization. Experimental results demonstrate accurate state-of-charge estimation (RMSE 0.23%) and low-latency real-time monitoring, highlighting the framework’s potential for deployment in large-scale EV BMS applications.