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

Chapter 2: Planning Your Digital Twin

In the previous chapter, we learned why we need Digital Twins and how to use them to drive specific business outcomes. We explored the history of the Digital Twin and the various industries in which it presents opportunities.

Now, let's examine how to plan for an industrial Digital Twin in an enterprise setting. We will identify the key criteria that can be used to determine whether the industrial Digital Twin is applicable to the business scenarios. Additionally, we will explore how to develop the business case for investments in the Digital Twin. Following this, we will explore the prerequisites for the Digital Twin in an enterprise, including the functional and non-functional requirements. This will allow us to identify the underlying digital technologies required for the Digital Twin. Note that we will not lose sight of the organizational factors that are in play for the success of the industrial Digital Twin initiatives.

In this...