Are you making the most of your data? Curious about Digital Twins but not sure where to start? It is now easier and faster than ever to create a virtual replica of a real-world object or system. Amazon Web Services IoT TwinMaker is a breath of fresh air, making improved operational performance a more readily achievable outcome for many more organisations.
IoT devices have become an important data source. Organisations have spent years investing in the technology, gaining business insight as a result. But to date, that insight has still largely been visualised and presented in the form of charts, diagrams or tables. More, the data harvested from physical environments - say, sensors monitoring water or air quality deployed at certain locations or 360 view smart cameras - provides limited insight in its current form. In those instances broader spatial and temporal settings count, alongside any readings, footage or signals. So to better understand the operation, perhaps where there may be anomalies or alarms, the actual physical environment needs to be reproduced in some form.
This is where a Digital Twin earns its keep. With its help, you can zoom in and out on a map to locate where the air quality or water quality indicators are, and how this location compares to others. You can see how measurements have evolved over time. This enhanced level of visibility helps boost productivity: you can get what you want more quickly, easily and can better understand what it’s telling you. It’s far richer than a static chart or table with numbers.
With the AWS IoT TwinMaker, launched just over a year ago, the process of deploying a Digital Twin is much easier. In short, Amazon has done a lot of the heavy-lifting previously needed. With expert guidance on the initial deployment, you can be up and running with an initial deployment of Digital Twin in just weeks.
How does it work?
Step one: data ingestion. It supports diverse data sources such as: IoT, video, event and application data.
Step two: data correlation. The ingested data needs to be correlated with spatial and temporal inputs. Spatial data can be a building floor plan, often three dimensional. Temporal data can indicate changes over a period of time. The correlation can be done with coordinates or any other similar approaches to describe the spatial presence of data.
Step three: forming the twin via modelling. Recreate the physical environment using a 3D floor plan, the CAD drawing for machinery or pipes at a manufacturing plant or geospatial site maps for a mining site. TwinMaker supports some existing formats of such drawings. Once the Twin is created, the modelled data will be overlaid on top. Finally, the spatial and temporal forming of the twin is completed. The visualisation part of TwinMaker is a fully-managed Grafana dashboard (an interactive web service that visualises data) that can be highly customised to what the use case needs.
We recently built a proof of concept using TwinMaker, in just a few weeks. Using IoT devices that captured humidity and temperature sensor data overlaid with a site plan, we managed to demonstrate the readings from a room and clearly show its location within that building on an interactive 3D map. On the Digital Twin dashboard we could replay the readings over a period of time and set up notifications with threshold values for events and alarms. We then amplified anomaly detection by using Amazon’s CloudWatch monitoring. We see the potential of extending the use case to many scenarios across different industries. It clearly demonstrates two aspects. Firstly, it allows the quick pinpointing of any issue in a complex indoor environment. Secondly, it enables the triage of an issue by winding back and forth with the data points reported.
Digital Twins present a huge opportunity to organisations willing to take the next step with their data. And now, it’s easier than ever. This technology improves efficiency and productivity, reduces operational costs and risks. There are many successful use cases for Digital Twins across all sorts of industries. With the emergence of advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, Digital Twins can even lead to more sophisticated use cases in the Metaverse. Are you ready?
If you would like a proof-of-concept or pilot build, get in touch. Or for more information, contact one of our team below.
