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

Validating the problem statement and outcomes

Reviewing the problem statement and expected outcomes is part of the initial phases' validated learning focus, as shown in Figure 4.4. It provides us with the opportunity to iterate and pivot toward a successful project continuously.

It is essential to validate the problem that you are solving and the expectation of the business outcomes during each phase of the development life cycle (Figure 4.1) of your Digital Twin prototype. The easiest way to do this is to use the lean Digital Twin canvas in a formal review workshop at the end of each phase. You can use this as a checkpoint to ensure that all the stakeholders are still aligned with both the problem and the expected business outcomes.

You should update the canvas with a new version for each phase to provide valuable insights at the end of the project. By doing this, you will be able to evaluate the evolution of the problem statement on the expected business outcomes over...