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

Chapter 7: Deployment and Value Tracking

In Chapter 6, Building the Digital Twin Prototype, we covered the development of a wind-farm Digital Twin that consists of many wind turbines, each with its own Digital Twin. The Digital Twin application was configured using the Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE) on the Microsoft Azure Digital Twins (ADT) service. The Visual Studio IDE approach is for programmers who want to build advanced Digital Twin applications on the ADT service. We further demonstrated this using a no-code application development platform aimed at subject-matter experts (SMEs) who want to create Digital Twin applications without coding. We further assessed the testing, technical evaluation, and business validation of our first Digital Twin.

This chapter will focus on the deployment and scaling of the solution in an operational environment. This will help to provide a structured approach, from initial experimentation with a Digital Twin to a target...