The IEA HPT Annex 56 project aims to survey the opportunities and challenges of IoT-enabled heat pumps and make them available to the relevant target groups, in particular OEMs, heat pump manufacturers, associations and regulatory authorities. The project thus contributes to the strategy of the IEA HPT TCP, which widened the scope of research, development, demonstration and deployment (RDD&D) of heat pumping technologies to include possibilities offered by the developments in the area of digitalisation and IoT.

The annex project includes IoT-friendly heat pumps for household, commercial and industrial applications. The technical framework conditions will be determined to use heat pumps as IoT components. It will be elaborated how heat pumps can be represented by suitable data and information models and which protocols are suitable for the connection to the IoT. Based on different

digital twins of heat pumps, methods for data analysis will be investigated for their suitability. Applications and possible business models based on IoT-enabled heat pumps are analysed and evaluated. In addition, the risks of connected devices will be determined regarding information and data security and privacy.

The result is a structured overview of IoT-enabled heat pumps, which, by embedding the national project in the international IEA research cooperation, also includes findings from the other participating countries. The results will be broadly disseminated to the relevant target groups.