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

Digital Twins Definition Language

The models in the Azure Digital Twins service are based on the Digital Twins Definition Language (DTDL). DTDL is a language that's used to describe models. These models are used with IoT plug and play devices and Digital Twins. DTDL allows us to use semantics and definitions uniformly to define these models, which are used across IoT platforms and IoT solutions. DTDL enables us to define several elements, behaviors, and abilities of a Digital Twin. Digital Twins' behaviors are modeled using meta model classes with DTDL. Several examples of these meta models are listed here and will be explained in more detail in the next part of this chapter:

  • Interfaces: A descriptive language for describing models.
  • Properties: The simple types of metadata of a model.
  • Telemetry: The telemetry data that comes from a sensor. It can be used as metadata in a model.
  • Relationships: Relationship definitions between models.
  • Components: A way...