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

Chapter 1: About Digital Twins

This chapter will explore the concept of a Digital Twin. A Digital Twin is a virtual representation of the real world combined with real-world data. Digital Twins can be used for a variety of scenarios. Digital Twins can be used to visualize insights or to simulate real-life situations by using a virtual representation and real-life sensory data. Learning about Digital Twins allows you to build solutions around these scenarios.

In this chapter, we'll go through several scenarios to understand Digital Twin implementations. We'll look at Microsoft's Azure Digital Twins service and how it allows us to model a Digital Twin. We'll walk through the layout of the service and how it is incorporated into the model of a Digital Twin. Part of that is a global overview of the architecture, which includes the relationship to other Azure services. This is required to create an actual Digital Twin solution. We will finish with an overview of the available SDKs and APIs for using Azure Digital Twins to create your own Digital Twin solutions. The chapter contains a lot of introductions to different services and tools that will appear again in the following chapters.

In this chapter, we'll go through the following topics:

  • Understanding the concept of the Digital Twin
  • Exploring the Digital Twin environment
  • Looking at real-world applications
  • Azure Digital Twins
  • Understanding the components of Azure Digital Twins architecture
  • Exploring Azure Digital Twins APIs