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

Summary

In this chapter, we considered the planning frameworks we need before starting our first Digital Twin project. We looked at a project planning framework, which describes the phases involved, and a solution planning framework, which defines the problem that we are addressing, the users that it is focused on, and the expected outcome.

Then, we reviewed how to validate the problem statement and expected outcomes and how this would influence existing and future business processes. We also considered the impact of our technology decisions. Finally, we provided a high-level overview of the enabling technologies and the different types of digital platforms we can use to set up our first Digital Twin in the next chapter.

In Chapter 5, Setting Up a Digital Twin Prototype, we will start setting up our first Digital Twin prototype by choosing a Digital Twin platform, deciding on the cloud infrastructure, and initiating the configuration and setup. We will also consider the impact...