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

Key criteria

Here, we will identify the key criteria to help an enterprise decide when the introduction of an industrial Digital Twin makes sense. The Digital Twin can be for a physical asset system or a process such as a manufacturing process in a plant. Depending on the target of the Digital Twin, objective criteria have to be established to ensure that the Digital Twin will add business value. Here, business values and outcomes are used in a broader sense, and they could include the following:

  • Improved life of the asset
  • Process efficiency gains
  • Operational optimization or lower operating costs
  • New digital revenues
  • Competitive advantage
  • Improved end customer satisfaction
  • Improved safety
  • A social good such as the reduction of the carbon footprint

As a result, once the key criteria have been established, it is easier to evaluate the direct and indirect investments and opportunity costs versus the broader business value generated. Figure 2...