Building Industrial Digital Twins: Design, develop, and deploy digital twin solutions for real-world industries using Azure Digital Twins

Build your first digital twin MVP and gain first-hand experience of using the technology, the challenges it presents, and its impact on your organization

Key Features

• Create a digital twin prototype using Microsoft Azure Digital Twin
• Explore the digital twin approach to the design, operations, and maintenance of industrial assets and products
• Understand key characteristics and components of a digital twin through practical use cases and business scenarios

Book Description

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.

What you will learn

• Identify key criteria for the applicability of digital twins in your organization
• Explore the RACI matrix and rapid experimentation for choosing the right tech stack for your digital twin system
• Evaluate public cloud, industrial IoT, and enterprise platforms to set up your prototype
• Develop a digital twin prototype and validate it using a unit test, integration test, and functional test
• Perform an RoI analysis of your digital twin to determine its economic viability for the business
• Discover techniques to improve your digital twin for future enhancements

Who this book is for

The digital twin book is for mid-career subject experts, including engineers and operations managers, building their first prototype (MVP) using digital twin technology. The book will help professionals responsible for mechanical, process, and reliability engineering domains. You don't have to be a developer or programmer, but beginner-level programming skills will be helpful.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction to Digital Twin
2. Planning Your Digital Twin
3. Identifying the First Digital Twin
4. Getting Started with Our First Digital Twin
5. Setting Up a Digital Twin Prototype
6. Building the Digital Twin Prototype
7. Deployment and Value Tracking
8. Enhancing the Digital Twin

Shyam Varan Nath is a Specialist Leader, Analytics and Cognitive, at Deloitte. Prior to this, he worked for Oracle, General Electric, IBM, and Halliburton. He is the primary author of two books, Industrial Digital Transformation, and Architecting the Industrial Internet. His expertise involves IIoT, cloud computing, databases, AI/ML, and business analytics. He has worked on driving digital transformation at several large companies. He is a member of the Distinguished Toastmasters (DTM) club and very active on Twitter. He is the founder of the analytics user group called AnDOUC (formerly BIWA). He has an undergraduate degree from IIT Kanpur, India, as well as an MSc (in computer science) and an MBA from FAU, Boca Raton, Florida. Shyam is part of the Program Committee of IoTSWC and a regular speaker at large technology events. Pieter van Schalkwyk, CEO at XMPro, is an experienced engineer and technologist who helps organizations use real-time, event-based digital twins to improve situational awareness, process efficiency, and decision making without disrupting operations. He is recognized as a thought leader in industrial digital transformation and has written and spoken extensively on topics including digital twins, IIoT, AI/ML, and industrial blockchain applications. Pieter holds a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering and a master's degree in information technology. He chairs the Natural Resources Working Group in the Digital Twin Consortium (DTC). Prior to this, Pieter was the chair of the Digital Twin Interoperability Task Group within the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC). In February 2019, Pieter received the IIC Technical Innovation Award. He describes himself as an entrepreneur at heart, technology enthusiast, team builder, and aspiring Ironman triathlete.