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

Configuration and setup

Before we can configure our first Digital Twin in Microsoft ADT, we must set up the cloud infrastructure and account on Microsoft Azure. Microsoft provides detailed setup instructions for Azure administrators, but we will start from the perspective of a non-corporate user that wants to set up a free account to build a first digital-twin prototype. The ADT documentation is at http://bit.ly/idt-azuredocs.

The first step is to create a free Azure account that will host your ADT service and any other IoT and analytics services that you will need for your first Digital Twin. See the following screenshot for an overview of how to do this:

Figure 5.7 – Microsoft Azure portal UI

Once you've created an account, you will be directed to the Azure service portal. This is the central management environment for all Azure services, including ADT, Azure databases, IoT services, and all the other products that Microsoft provides in...