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

Testing framework

The next step in Figure 6.5 is to create an application to provide maintainability and scalability over a large number of wind turbine instances and to pass real-time telemetry data to the Digital Twin. This adds ease of use to the framework, for real-life scenarios.

Creating an application to update the Digital Twin prototype in code

Azure Digital Twins (ADT) is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution aimed at developers to create sigital twin solutions. For the purpose of the book, we will address two typical development personas. The first is a software developer that has the necessary coding skills to develop a solution by using the APIs and SDKs of ADT. At the time of writing the book, the ADT APIs and SDKs can be accessed in .NET, Java, JavaScript, Python, and Go.

The second persona is that of a subject-matter expert such as a reliability and maintenance engineer in the wind farm. The subject-matter expert has technical skills, but typically does not...