AI and AI-powered digital twins for smart, green, and zero-energy buildings: A systematic review of leading-edge solutions for advancing environmental sustainability goals

Buildings are among the largest contributors to global energy consumption and carbon emissions, making their transformation essential for advancing environmental sustainability goals. Innovative technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and digital twins (DTs) offer powerful tools for optimizing performance in smart, green, and zero-energy buildings. However, existing research remains fragmented—AI and AI-driven DT applications are often confined to isolated functions or specific building types—resulting in a limited, non-cohesive understanding of their collective potential in the built environment. This fragmentation, in turn, has hindered the development of integrated strategies that link building-level efficiencies with the broader environmental objectives of smart cities. To address these interrelated gaps, this study conducts a comprehensive systematic review of leading-edge AI and AI-powered DT solutions applied across smart, green, and zero-energy buildings. It aims to provide a holistic understanding of how these solutions enhance environmental performance through the analysis of key building-related indicators. By synthesizing, comparing, and evaluating recent research, it examines how AI and AI-powered DT technologies facilitate integrated, system-level strategies that promote environmentally sustainable smart practices across the built environment. The study reveals that AI enhances smart buildings by enabling dynamic energy optimization, occupant-centered environmental control, improved thermal comfort, renewable energy integration, and predictive system management. In green buildings, AI contributes to greater resource efficiency, minimizes construction and operational waste, promotes the use of sustainable materials, strengthens cost estimation and risk assessment processes, and supports adaptive design strategies. For zero-energy buildings, AI facilitates multi-objective optimization, advances explainable and transparent AI-driven control systems, supports performance benchmarking against net and nearly zero-energy standards, and enables renewable energy integration tailored to diverse climatic and regulatory contexts. Furthermore, AI-powered DTs enable real-time environmental monitoring, predictive analytics, anomaly detection, and adaptive operational strategies, thereby enhancing building performance, energy optimization, and resilience. At broader spatial scales, these technologies foster interconnected urban ecosystems, advancing environmental sustainability, sustainable development, and smart city initiatives. Building on these insights, this study introduces a novel integrated framework that positions AI and AI-driven DTs as systemic enablers of environmentally sustainable smart built and urban environments, emphasizing their cross-scale convergence in promoting carbon neutrality, circular economy principles, climate resilience, and regenerative urban strategies. The findings offer actionable pathways for advancing research agendas, inform practical strategies for building and urban system design, and provide evidence-based recommendations for policymakers committed to fostering more intelligent, sustainable, and resilient urban futures. This work establishes AI and AI-driven DTs as transformative catalysts for realizing the next generation of resource-efficient, carbon-neutral, and ecologically integrated urban ecosystems.