Smart Indoor Space Simulation Methodologies: A Review

Research on smart indoor space applications, which focus on the occupants’ trace, requires a design process consisting of deploying several devices (sensors and actuators) and developing software components (services). The design process in the real-world is labour-intensive, costly and time-consuming, which implies the need for a simulation-based prototyping framework for quickly simulating smart indoor space applications. An increasing body of literature has sought to provide simulation methodologies for smart indoor space applications. However, a unified taxonomy that represents the simulation tools in terms of their essential components and their specifications is missing. In this survey paper, we systematically collect the related papers and derive a taxonomy for the specifications of the smart indoor space simulation tools. We use the taxonomy in order to cluster the papers. Our results indicate that our proposed taxonomy can divide papers into meaningful groups. We review each group in detail, summarize each paper, and provide insights into their specifications.