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

Enhancements and next steps

Here, we will take a holistic look at the Digital Twin program from the perspective of a company that is adopting and rolling out such a program. We saw in Figure 8.5 a high-level rollout of the Digital Twin solution for the wind farm. Next, let's look at an enhanced and more detailed view in Figure 8.19. The major blocks from the left to the right are as follows:

  • Supply chain networks – these are external networks of the supply chain ecosystem consisting of vendors, distributors, and logistics providers. Considering the disruption in the global supply chain during the COVID-19 pandemic, this area is ripe for supply chain and logistics Digital Twins in the near future.
  • Enterprise systems – these consist of the Information Technology (IT) systems in the enterprise, such as Oracle Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Salesforce.com as Customer Relationship Management (CRM), or the Manufacturing Execution System (MES).
  • External...