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

Functional testing of the Digital Twin

Functional testing is standard practice in developing software applications, and creating Digital Twin solutions is no exception. For Digital Twins, however, we recommend functional testing of both the Digital Twin infrastructure and the Digital Twin application.

In Chapter 5, Setting Up a Digital Twin Prototype, we created models and instances of a wind farm and wind turbines as your Digital Twin prototype solution. Testing the functionality and integrity of the models and ensuring that they are correctly deployed is the first step of functional testing of a Digital Twin. Once we've confirmed that our Digital Twin infrastructure is working effectively, we can test the actual Digital Twin applications configured in Chapter 6, Building the Digital Twin Prototype.

Let's look at the test framework next.

Testing the Digital Twin infrastructure

Your wind-farm Digital Twin prototype was configured on the ADT platform as a service...