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

Full deployment

Now that we've completed both prototype development and a pilot installation of our Digital Twin solution, we are ready to move to full-scale deployment.

We often hear the term pilot purgatory, which is associated with pilots that do not move to production. The IoT World Forum (IoTWF) reported in 2017 that 60% of IoT initiatives stall at the POC and pilot phases (http://bit.ly/idt-IoTWF).

This may sound like an alarming statistic, but in reality, it shows that the phased development approach of Figure 7.10 works as it filters out projects that are likely to be unsuccessful at scale. This means that these projects could not satisfy the criteria of the technology at work, the business value, or the user acceptance. It is better to have projects fail at the early stages when the financial and business impact is limited, rather than end up with expensive failed projects that also damage personal and organizational reputations.

However, the next stage is a...