E-Book, Englisch, 446 Seiten
Meijers Hands-On Azure Digital Twins
1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-1-80107-397-4
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection
A practical guide to building distributed IoT solutions
E-Book, Englisch, 446 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-80107-397-4
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection
In today's world, clients are using more and more IoT sensors to monitor their business processes and assets. Think about collecting information such as pressure in an engine, the temperature, or a light switch being turned on or off in a room. The data collected can be used to create smart solutions for predicting future trends, creating simulations, and drawing insights using visualizations. This makes it beneficial for organizations to make digital twins, which are digital replicas of the real environment, to support these smart solutions.
This book will help you understand the concept of digital twins and how it can be implemented using an Azure service called Azure Digital Twins. Starting with the requirements and installation of the Azure Digital Twins service, the book will explain the definition language used for modeling digital twins. From there, you'll go through each step of building digital twins using Azure Digital Twins and learn about the different SDKs and APIs and how to use them with several Azure services. Finally, you'll learn how digital twins can be used in practice with the help of several real-world scenarios.
By the end of this book, you'll be confident in building and designing digital twins and integrating them with various Azure services.
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Table of Contents - About Digital Twins
- Requirements and Installation
- Digital Twin Definition Model
- Understanding Models
- Model Elements
- Creating Relationships between Azure Digital Twin Models
- Querying Digital Twins
- Building Models Using Ontologies
- APIs and SDKs
- Building a Digital Twin Pipeline
- Updating the Model
- Event Routing
- Setting Up Azure Maps
- Integrating Azure Maps
- Monitoring and Troubleshooting
- Facility of the Future
- Creating Digital Twins for Smart Building
- Simulations Using a Digital Twin
: About Digital Twins
This chapter will explore the concept of a Digital Twin. A Digital Twin is a virtual representation of the real world combined with real-world data. Digital Twins can be used for a variety of scenarios. Digital Twins can be used to visualize insights or to simulate real-life situations by using a virtual representation and real-life sensory data. Learning about Digital Twins allows you to build solutions around these scenarios.
In this chapter, we'll go through several scenarios to understand Digital Twin implementations. We'll look at Microsoft's Azure Digital Twins service and how it allows us to model a Digital Twin. We'll walk through the layout of the service and how it is incorporated into the model of a Digital Twin. Part of that is a global overview of the architecture, which includes the relationship to other Azure services. This is required to create an actual Digital Twin solution. We will finish with an overview of the available SDKs and APIs for using Azure Digital Twins to create your own Digital Twin solutions. The chapter contains a lot of introductions to different services and tools that will appear again in the following chapters.
In this chapter, we'll go through the following topics:
- Understanding the concept of the Digital Twin
- Exploring the Digital Twin environment
- Looking at real-world applications
- Azure Digital Twins
- Understanding the components of Azure Digital Twins architecture
- Exploring Azure Digital Twins APIs
Understanding the concept of a Digital Twin
You have probably heard someone talking about Digital Twins in the last few years. You could even say that it has been a buzzword for some time. But since 2019-2020, it's become more than just a buzzword. Organizations and people have started to understand the benefits of having a Digital Twin. There has even been a large increase in organizations that want to start and implement a Digital Twin.
But what is a Digital Twin? I get that question a lot. And every time it is difficult to come up with an answer that others will understand. And even referring to the definition on Wikipedia will not make it easy to understand. There are a lot of different definitions you can find online in articles and blog posts. To explain what a Digital Twin is requires a definition to start with followed by a more in-depth explanation of the definition itself. I use the following definition:
A Digital Twin is a digital replica of entities and their relationships in a reality
You may have noticed that this definition contains several terms: digital replica, entities, and reality. It becomes clearer when explaining each of them in more depth.
Digital replica
A digital replica is a way of storing several entities and their relationships in a specific model. Such a model is stored in a location according to your requirements and needs. An example could be a database or service. Each product on the market that is available to create a Digital Twin has its own way of storing the information that describes the model. That means that the digital replica can describe a real-life situation using definitions and parameters. Think of a machine and whether it is turned on or off. The digital replica would describe the machine and its state. But a digital replica could also be about a collection of machines and their relationships. Think of a machine that is creating a product and the machine that is packing the product. The packing machine requires products to pack anything. That relationship is also described in a digital replica.
Entities
Entities can be different things. An entity can be anything from a physical living being such as people to a physical non-living thing such as processes, machines, buildings, equipment, rooms, and devices. When we talk about physical, it means being physically part of the reality from which you create a digital replica. Each of these entities has a specific purpose within the model. An entity is described by its characteristics that are relevant to the model and what you try to achieve in your solution. An entity could be a temperature sensor installed in a room. The characteristics are then the location of that sensor, the temperature the sensor is measuring, and the notifications it is raising when the temperature gets too low or too high. The location in this case is the room where the sensor is located. That characteristic is a relationship to another entity called the room. All these characteristics when developing Digital Twins are described by properties and metadata.
Relationships
An important part of a Digital Twin is the way entities are related to each other. These relationships are important as they define the context in which the entities are depending on each other and are a part of the reality on which the model is based. A relationship itself defines a set of data based on how the relationship is defined between the entities. An example is the relationship between the temperature sensor and the room where it is installed. This relationship defines what the temperature is within the room. Business rules can be used to take certain actions based on entities and their underlying relationships. An example would be switching off the lights within the room when there is no movement for a pre-defined time. In that situation, the lights, motion sensor, and room are each an entity with underlying relationships.
Realities
Each entity is part of a reality. Normally the reality would be a part of the physical world around us, like the example of the temperature sensor in a room. In that case, we have an actual device, room, and building. But imagine a world that represents a theoretical reality. This could be a virtual, generated reality that acts as the source for the digital replica. An example would be a digital world created in virtual reality or even another Digital Twin.
You have just learned about the concept of Digital Twins and its elements. This is important since it will help you to understand how Digital Twins can be applied to different scenarios. In the next section, we will explore the different parts of the environment around a Digital Twin to implement Digital Twin solutions.
Exploring the Digital Twin environment
It is important to understand that we need to do more than just store a model of entities to use a Digital Twin. Using a Digital Twin requires us to bind information to our entities in the model and use some method of visualization to view the model and its outputs.
Figure 1.1 – High-level overview of a Digital Twin environment
The model in shows a high-level overview of everything that is in some way used within a Digital Twin environment:
- Entities – This part represents the entities from your reality. This is, for example, real-world assets, people, processes, and locations. Data that defines these entities is stored in some way in the Digital Twin.
- Digital Twin – This is the digital replica model of the entities in the reality.
- Input module – This part of the model provides data from entities into the Digital Twin model. In some situations, this is also used to dynamically generate the model-based structure of the entities. It depends heavily on actual data that flows from the entities being used in the reality.
- Output module – The output of the model is in most cases used to visualize the data in some way. But that is not always the case. The output could also be a setting turned on based on business logic and rules that are triggered by the input.
- Business logic and Rules modules – This is all about building logic and rules around the data in your Digital Twin. The result of this logic can resolve into setting the data of entities in the Digital Twin. You could extend this by connecting to or triggering the actual entity.
- Visualize – It is often thought that a Digital Twin is visualized. But that is not always the case. In many situations, the data flows back to the entity itself. But in some situations, a visualization of data could enhance the experience and benefit the business process. Visualization can be reached in many ways. Think of a display at the door of a meeting room displaying availability, an Excel that is filled with output data, or using augmented glasses to create a 3D presentation based on the data from the entities.
- Security – Each module needs to have some sort of role-based security. This can influence what data flows in and out of the Digital Twin. It could be used to only view the data that you are allowed to see based on your role in the organization. But it could also be used to view a subset of output data coming from the Digital Twin.
Now let's look at how a Digital Twin is connected to real-world entities.
A Digital Twin needs to be integrated with the physical and...
