Book Image

Hands-On Azure Digital Twins

By : Alexander Meijers
Book Image

Hands-On Azure Digital Twins

By: Alexander Meijers

Overview of this book

In today’s world, clients are using more and more IoT sensors to monitor their business processes and assets. Think about collecting information such as pressure in an engine, the temperature, or a light switch being turned on or off in a room. The data collected can be used to create smart solutions for predicting future trends, creating simulations, and drawing insights using visualizations. This makes it beneficial for organizations to make digital twins, which are digital replicas of the real environment, to support these smart solutions. This book will help you understand the concept of digital twins and how it can be implemented using an Azure service called Azure Digital Twins. Starting with the requirements and installation of the Azure Digital Twins service, the book will explain the definition language used for modeling digital twins. From there, you'll go through each step of building digital twins using Azure Digital Twins and learn about the different SDKs and APIs and how to use them with several Azure services. Finally, you'll learn how digital twins can be used in practice with the help of several real-world scenarios. By the end of this book, you'll be confident in building and designing digital twins and integrating them with various Azure services.
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
1
Section 1: Azure Digital Twin Essentials
4
Section 2: Getting Started with Azure Digital Twins
11
Section 3: Digital Twins Advanced Techniques
19
Section 4: Digital Twin Implementations in Real-world Scenarios

Creating your first Digital Twin

This final section will help you to create your first Digital Twin using Azure Digital Twins Explorer. The source code of Azure Digital Twins Explorer comes with a rich set of example files that we can use to create the first Digital Twin graph. The example files can be found here: C:\Github\digital-twins-explorer-master\client\examples.

The structure of Azure Digital Twins will be explained in depth in the upcoming chapters. For now, we need to understand that an Azure Digital Twins instance contains one or more Digital Twins. Each Digital Twin, which represents an entity, is based on a model. A model defines the properties of the Digital Twin and the relationships to other Digital Twins. A Digital Twin Graph is a visual representation of Digital Twins and their relationships.

Uploading models

A Digital Twin is always created from a model. Models are defined by JSON files. This means that we need to upload the models first. Perform the following...