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

Technological needs

In the preceding sections, we comprehensively discussed the prerequisites and requirements around the industrial Digital Twin. Now, let's take a look at the technological needs arising out of those requirements. Some of the recent emerging and digital technologies will come in handy here. We will examine areas such as the following:

  1. The framework and the model: IIoT systems and cloud versus on-premises
  2. Connectivity: From the asset to the edge, the edge to the cloud, and the cloud to the cloud
  3. Data capture and storage
  4. Edge computing
  5. Algorithms and analytics: The Central Processing Unit (CPU) and the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)
  6. Platforms and applications
  7. Visualization: The dashboard, alerts, and Augmented Reality (AR) or Virtual Reality (VR)
  8. Insights and actions: A human in the loop and field services
  9. Feedback: Product feedback, processes/operations, and training
  10. Software development paradigms and low code
...