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

Expected business outcomes

In the Industry use of Digital Twins section of Chapter 1, Introduction to Digital Twin, we discussed the applicable industry segments for the industrial Digital Twin. Now, let's take a look at the more specific business outcomes that are expected, or are possible, in some of these scenarios.

The manufacturing industry

When dealing with physical products, the manufacturer is responsible for the following:

  • Product design and development
  • Manufacturing/assembly
  • Supply chain and distribution
  • Product warranty and reputation
  • Optional service contracts

Let's take a further look at discrete and process manufacturing within this context.

Discrete manufacturing

Let's take the example of aircraft manufacturing. A commercial aircraft is a fairly complex product and consists of assemblies such as the body or the fuselage, wings, two or four engines, landing gears, and the stabilizer. To build the Digital Twin of...