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

Pilot rollout

Digital-twin projects follow a typical evolution that starts with proving concept through prototyping, piloting, and then full-scale deployment. Each of these phases serves a specific purpose along the journey of creating a successful Digital Twin solution.

The following screenshot shows the evolution from concepts to full deployment and how the scope evolves along the journey:

Figure 7.10 – Evolution from concept to full deployment

During the initial proof-of-concept (POC) phase, the objective is to demonstrate the viability of specific technological or design components. This phase verifies the suitability of using these concepts in developing a production system and serves as a decision point or gate to determine if a specific solution can move to the prototyping phase. In the case of our wind turbine example, we may use a POC to determine if the data that we receive from our sensors is sufficient to create a machine learning (ML...