Microsoft Azure Digital Twin Platform and it's Benefits

Introduction to Azure Digital Twin Platform

When we talk about the Internet of Things solutions, think of devices like a windmill, which consists of sensors that generate pressure or temperature data, which need to be processed & stored. All this to be done to predict future trends & prepare for anomalies in a product's life cycle. To understand the real environment, organizations are working on creating digital replicas of the physical world. These replicas are digital twins.

What is Azure Digital Twin?

Azure Digital Twins a platform as a service. That focuses on providing insights about the products going into a real-time environment by virtualizing real-time environments with data from associated devices & sensors to use better information based on past & present info, enabling the business to enhance their product & predict future events. In 2018, Microsoft launched the Azure Digital Twins IoT platform's preview version. The idea behind digital twins is to create a digital replica of a physical world like a car, windmill, or even a human and use the twin as the main point of digital interaction. On October 15th, 2020, Microsoft announced that Azure Digital Twins is available generally to create an enterprise-grade model deployment.

First, smart components use sensors to gather data about real-time status, working conditions, or positions with a physical item. Source: What Is Digital Twin Technology - And Why Is It So Important?

What are the Capabilities of the Digital Twins Platform?

Azure Digital Twins came into existence to ensure simplification & accelerated creation of Iot based solutions. Organizations easily create, customize & connect solutions with vertical domain specialization like 3D or 4D or even physical-based simulation due to its comprehensive set of capabilities like Digital Twins Definition Language (DTDL) for modeling and validating tools & Azure Digital Twins explorer helps visualize the graph representing a given environment. Other capabilities like:

DTDL

It's an open modeling language similar to JSON ( JavaScript Object Notation) to create custom models with ease. In an intelligent environment with the support of pre-made models to accelerate development. Connecting twins create a real-world environment. Each twin has unique properties, which define how twins can connect a rich knowledge graph. DTDL works as a glue that connects digital twin solutions connected with other parts of the Azure ecosystem.

Live Execution

Live execution of digital twins, which is scalable & secure with the incorporation of data from Iot devices & other sources, using a rich event system to keep graphs up to date with business logic. It allows you to query models for insights with a wide range of conditions & relationships. With the help of a prosperous event system to keep graphs up-to-date with business logic and data processing. It allows us to connect with azure functions to customize the data processing. To extract insights from a live execution environment, azure digital-twins provides a query system that allows you to search for twins on a wide range of relationships.

Input from IoT Devices

It gets easily connected via Azure IoT hub to assets like IoT & Azure IoT Edge devices to use as input and business systems(ERP, CRM) to have relevant insight. Azure digital-twin provides REST API, which opens up a wide range of data sources other than IoT unlocks more actionable insights.

Output to Time Series Insights

Data in the azure digital twin model can be downstream to additional analytics & storage. This feature is provided through the event route, which uses a service bus, event hub, event grid to drive the desired data flow. Integration with other Azure services allows storing data in Azure data lake or even analytics via Azure Synapse analytics for applying machine learning. Combining all these capabilities eases creating models Digital Transformation & digital representation of the environment & allows you to focus on what differentiates your business rather than focusing on complex tasks.

What are the Use-Cases of Azure Digital Twins?

To have a look at Azure Digital Twins with a wider perspective. Many use cases are below to give better insight. Like engines, turbines or trains can design and test digitally before actual production. Also, it can help in maintenance. Before applying the proposed fix of equipment, testing completes digitally before physical implementation.

Manufacturing Industry: It will be a great help to have insight into the usage cycle of parts of machinery. To ensure the replacement of these parts before it gets broken. Some parts' prediction usage is not easy to ensure work continuity.
Hotel Industry: To know the devices in a room & a list of devices that should be serviced or even to measure electronic devices' power consumption to replace them with an efficient one.
Monitor meeting is serviceability: Install motion sensors in the meeting room. Connecting to Azure digital twins to find a meeting room in real-time will be much easier.

Digital Twins play a significant role in Industries using IoT, Big Data Analytics, AI and Automation solutions. Azure Internet of Things Services and Solutions

What are the Benefits of Azure Digital Twins?

Digital twins give you an insight into real-time happening with physical assets with the help of models. Which radically eliminates maintenance burdens. With digital twins, organizations help cut costs in maintenance & reduction of defects & faster release cycles. Some of the experiences of the organization shared ahead:

Chevron cut expected millions of dollars in their oil & refinery field.
In their pitch, Siemens stated digital twins to be used for modeling & prototyping upcoming products will help them reduce defects & shorten time to market.

Summary

Making it easier to build IoT solutions with existing cloud services Azure Digital Twins. This article has gone through & showcased key concepts related to this service Digital-Twins & covered a few real-world scenarios. It has transformed the real-world approach for organizations. It will help forward-thinking organizations have an unprecedented connectivity & dataflow pace. For an initial level, start with specific scenarios that can add business values &, as moving forward, explore new opportunities and become apparent. Azure digital-twin also ensures security & privacy as it considers it an integral part.