Temperature management in both residential environments and commercial vehicle cabins are rapidly evolving toward intelligent, interconnected climate-control ecosystems. However, current systems operate in isolation, with no mechanism for synchronizing thermal comfort preferences between a user’s smart home and the cabin environment of a truck used for either personal mobility, last-mile delivery, or commercial logistics. This disjointed control results in inconsistent comfort experience, unnecessary HVAC energy consumption, and the inability to anticipate user needs based on transition patterns (e.g. leaving a cool home for a hot truck cabin) between home and vehicle.
To address this technical challenge, this research paper provides bidirectional communication temperature-synchronization framework in which a smart-home HVAC app communicates seamlessly with the truck’s cabin climate-control system, integrating user-specific comfort profiles(such as temperature preferences, real-time cabin and home temperature, humidity levels, HVAC operating states, outside weather forecasts, trip start times, thermal-soak estimates etc.) and environmental prediction models to maintain consistent thermal comfort across both environments. Based on user’s comfort profile, our framework derives the Comfort Deviation Index (CDI), Transient Temperature Gradient (TTG) and applies predictive algorithms to precondition the cabin or home environment accordingly. The AI technique Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network is used for forecasting temperature transitions across home-to-vehicle.
Our technique becomes even more pronounced in small-haul trucks that operate under frequent stop-and-go conditions, where rapid cabin temperature fluctuations are common. There is currently no existing research or framework that enables seamless temperature synchronization between a user’s home environment and the truck cabin. A smart-home–to-cabin synchronization approach would fill this gap by intelligently accounting for outside weather, trip duration, thermal soak, and energy-efficiency constraints.
Additional challenges include ensuring secure communication over cloud and edge networks, managing latency constraints for real-time actuation, and preventing conflicts between home HVAC automation and automotive HVAC control logic