Book Image

Building Industrial Digital Twins

By : Shyam Varan Nath, Pieter van Schalkwyk
Book Image

Building Industrial Digital Twins

By: Shyam Varan Nath, Pieter van Schalkwyk

Overview of this book

Digital twin technology enables organizations to create digital representations of physical entities such as assets, systems, and processes throughout their life cycle. It improves asset performance, utilization, and safe operations and reduces manufacturing, operational, and maintenance costs. The book begins by introducing you to the concept of digital twins and sets you on a path to develop a digital twin strategy to positively influence business outcomes in your organization. You'll understand how digital twins relate to physical assets, processes, and technology and learn about the prerequisite conditions for the right platform, scale, and use case of your digital twins. You'll then get hands-on with Microsoft's Azure Digital Twins platform for your digital twin development and deployment. The book equips you with the knowledge to evaluate enterprise and specialty platforms, including the cloud and industrial IoT required to set up your digital twin prototype. Once you've built your prototype, you'll be able to test and validate it relative to the intended purpose of the twin through pilot deployment, full deployment, and value tracking techniques. By the end of this book, you'll have developed the skills to build and deploy your digital twin prototype, or minimum viable twin, to demonstrate, assess, and monitor your asset at specific stages in the asset life cycle.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
1
Section 1: Defining Digital Twins
4
Section 2: Building the Digital Twin
10
Section 3: Enhancing the Digital Twin
12
Interview on Digital Twins with William (Bill) Ruh, CEO of Lendlease Digital
13
Interview on Digital Twins with Anwar Ahmed, CTO - Digital Services at GE Renewable Energy

Identifying related Digital Twins

In Figure 8.1, we looked into the energy ecosystem. The key parts of the electricity system are as follows:

  • The generation of electricity – renewable and nonrenewable sources
  • The transmission of electricity
  • The distribution of electricity
  • The consumption of electricity by residential and commercial consumers

This helps us to understand the electricity value chain and to identify future Digital Twins after the initial Digital Twin solution for the wind turbine is rolled out.

Let's look at Figure 8.7, the Digital Twins Definition Language (DTDL) ontology for the energy grid. Here, the ontology helps to describe the set of concepts and categories in an energy value chain. Furthermore, it helps to visualize the properties and the relations between the major components of the energy grid.

Figure 8.7 – Digital Twin ontology for the energy grid

Note

Image source: https://github.com...