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

Evaluating the first Digital Twin in the full system

In Chapter 7, Deployment and Value Tracking, we discussed functional testing of the Digital Twin of the wind turbine. This included testing the Digital Twin infrastructure as well as testing the Digital Twin application. Such testing precedes the pilot rollout of the Digital Twin. In Figure 7.12, we showed the success criteria for the pilot of the Digital Twin. Furthermore, Figure 7.17 to Figure 7.19 showed how to capture and present the KPIs in this context. Finally, we discussed the two rollout approaches:

  • The big bang approach
  • The phased approach

The big bang approach works well for mature technologies such as the rollout of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, where technology and functionality are very well understood by the stakeholders. The big bang approach for emerging technology adds more risk from technology, adoption, and economic perspectives. We will look at a phased approach here for the...