Digital Twin Smackdown!

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Welcome to IoT Coffee Talk🎙️50 to chat about Digital #Tech #Analytics #Automation #IoT #DigitalTwins #Edge #Cloud #DigitalTransformation #5G #AI #Data #Industry40 & #Sustainability over a cup of coffee.

Grab a cup and settle-in with some of the industry’s leading business minds and technology thought leaders for a lively, irreverent, and informative discussion about IoT in a totally unscripted, organic format.

In this installment, it is pure pandemonium, folks!! Our Digital Twin champion, Rob Tiffany, squares off with the legendary Aaron Allsbrook and his Intelligent Assets from ClearBlade in a battle of IoT titans! Don’t miss out on this IoT event of the century!

Click below to check out IoT Coffee Talk wherever you get your podcasts:

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Thanks for listening to us! Watch episodes at http://iotcoffeetalk.com/. Your hosts include Leonard Lee, Stephanie Atkinson, Marc Pous, David Vasquez, Rob Tiffany, Bill Pugh, Rick Bullotta and special guests.

We support Elevate Our Kids to bridge the digital divide by bringing K-12 computing devices and connectivity to support kids’ education in under-resourced communities. Please donate.

“Digital Twin Applications”

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Welcome to IoT Coffee Talk🎙️44 to chat about Digital #Tech #Analytics #Automation #IoT #DigitalTwins #Edge #Cloud #DigitalTransformation #5G #AI #Data #Industry40 & #Sustainability over a cup of coffee.

Grab a cup and settle-in with some of the industry’s leading business minds and technology thought leaders for a lively, irreverent, and informative discussion about IoT in a totally unscripted, organic format.

In this installment we discuss digital twin applications. What are they? What are the cool ones that are actually valuable? What are the typical category of applications and solutions that can be built on digital twins or using digital twins.

Click below to check out IoT Coffee Talk wherever you get your podcasts:

Thanks for listening to us! Watch episodes at http://iotcoffeetalk.com/. Your hosts include Leonard Lee, Stephanie Atkinson, Marc Pous, David Vasquez, Rob Tiffany, Bill Pugh, Rick Bullotta and special guests.

We support Elevate Our Kids to bridge the digital divide by bringing K-12 computing devices and connectivity to support kids’ education in under-resourced communities. Please donate.

“Digital Twin Best Practices”

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Welcome to IoT Coffee Talk🎙️29 to chat about Digital #Tech #Analytics #Automation #IoT #DigitalTwins #Edge #Cloud #DigitalTransformation #5G #AI #Data #Industry40 & #Sustainability over a cup of coffee.

Grab a cup and settle-in with some of the industry’s leading business minds and technology thought leaders for a lively, irreverent, and informative discussion about IoT in a totally unscripted, organic format.

In this week’s installment Stephanie Atkinson (Compass Intelligence), David Vasquez (Verizon), Leonard Lee (neXt Curve), Rick Bullotta (co-founder of Thingworx) and Rob Tiffany (Ericsson) talk about best practices in implementing and using digital twins. Stephanie, David and Leonard get to ask digital twin pioneers, Rob and Rick, questions about what it takes to get a digital twin deployment in place that will begin generating business value.

Click below to check out IoT Coffee Talk wherever you get your podcasts:

Thanks for listening to us! Watch episodes at http://iotcoffeetalk.com/. Your hosts include Leonard Lee, Stephanie Atkinson, Marc Pous, David Vasquez, Rob Tiffany, Bill Pugh, Rick Bullotta and special guests.

We support Elevate Our Kids to bridge the digital divide by bringing K-12 computing devices and connectivity to support kids’ education in under-resourced communities. Please donate.

“Digital Twins”

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Welcome to IoT Coffee Talk🎙️4 to chat about Digital #Tech #Analytics #Automation #IoT #DigitalTwins #Edge #Cloud #DigitalTransformation #5G #AI #Data #Industry40 & #Sustainability over a cup of coffee.

Grab a cup and settle-in with some of the industry’s leading business minds and technology thought leaders for a lively, irreverent, and informative discussion about IoT in a totally unscripted, organic format.

On this week’s episode Rob Tiffany (Ericsson), David Vasquez (Verizon), Marc Pous (thethings.io), Rick Bullotta (IoT Guru) and Leonard Lee (neXt Curve) talk about digital twins. This will a fun discussion that will probably one of many chats we will have on this cool topic.

Click below to check out IoT Coffee Talk wherever you get your podcasts:

Thanks for listening to us! Watch episodes at http://iotcoffeetalk.com/. Your hosts include Leonard Lee, Stephanie Atkinson, Marc Pous, David Vasquez, Rob Tiffany, Bill Pugh, Rick Bullotta and special guests.

We support Elevate Our Kids to bridge the digital divide by bringing K-12 computing devices and connectivity to support kids’ education in under-resourced communities. Please donate.

ZEDEDA: Digital Twin and AR/VR

At the ZEDEDA Transform 2020 event, I was joined by Richard Soley from OMGEdward Wood from Dispersive Networks, Inc., and Mike Pantaleano from Rockwell Automation where we discussed key #DigitalTwin considerations and use cases ranging from #IIoT to #AR to #VR.

Important insights that we’re happy to share with everyone. What made it even better was that I was connected into this virtual event from my happy place, Moab, Utah.

Register for free and watch the video on demand at the link below:

https://info.zededa.com/zededa-transform-access-page-edge-security-0

IoT Day 2020: Fighting COVID-19 with Digital Twins

Covid Twins

With #COVID19 sweeping the globe, knowledge is our best weapon in fighting this pandemic and associated economic collapse. #DigitalTwin technology is perfectly suited to represent people who have symptoms, are infected, or have recovered.

This capability can also aid in identifying people an infected person came in contact with via contact tracing using mobile apps and Bluetooth. Lastly, “green zones” can be identified where people can go back to work. Join Rob to learn how this powerful technology can be put to work in overcoming the Coronavirus threat.

Digital Twin Models and Process Properties

DigitalWindfarms

A process is a series of actions, tasks or steps taken in a linear or sometimes a branching, non-linear sequence in order to achieve a desired outcome.

These process steps could be manual activities undertaken by a person, purely digital steps taken by software across computers, electromechanical actions between digital messages and mechanical actuators as well as advanced cyber-physical tasks performed by industrial robots.

Let’s walk through a few examples:

  • A farmer checks the weather forecast everyday then drives their truck to appropriate orchards or fields to perform irrigation for a certain amount of time based on previous rainfall totals and the needs of the crops.
  • A digital scheduling system for doctor appointments retrieves appointment time and location preferences of the patient and combines it with their insurance information and the doctor’s current schedule to deliver a range of appointment times.
  • An electromechanical system uses motion sensors to notice a person has entered a meeting room and carries out steps to turn on lights, adjust room temperature, and turn on the projector to show a presentation.
  • Cyber-physical industrial robots perform individual tasks but also have awareness of the current state of other robots on the assembly line to better work together in building a car.

Rather than just using digital twins to provide visibility to ongoing operations or to improve future product development via simulation, why not use digital twins to orchestrate processes?

Let’s dive into the simple electromechanical scenario shown above:

Imagine the familiar IoT process where you need to turn on the lights, adjust room temperature and turn on the projector when a person enters a meeting room. You’ve got a Digital Twin that represents the meeting room which acts like a group or container for a collection of digital twins that represent motion sensors, HVAC, the lighting system and the projector.

All you need now is an process automated by bots to bring this to life.

The motion sensor detects a person walking-in which triggers a software bot on the associated microcontroller to send a message to an IoT platform or building management system. Upon receiving the message, a bot identifies the particular meeting room and sends a command to activate the overhead lights. Concurrently, a bot sends a command to the HVAC system to adjust the room to a comfortable temperature. Last but not least, a bot sends a command to turn on the overhead projector so the person can deliver a presentation.

How do you orchestrate this process?

Since this is a simple process, you could probably do this with a series of rules via the event processor in your IoT platform. Knowing that processes can become more complex with many variables and different forks in the road, you could instead choose to define the orchestration in a Digital Twin Model. With it’s available process properties, this twin defines the steps needed to guide software bots in taking the actions needed to achieve the desired outcome. Each step is represented by a process property. Each process property defines the digital twins involved, the APIs needed to connect, security requirements for calling those APIs, data to be sent, return values to expect and other details needed to successfully complete the step and move on to the next one.

This doesn’t have to be a 100% digital process.

In another scenario, the prescriptive analytics from an IoT platform might alert a technician to fix a broken component. The orchestrating digital twin model would still have its process properties except this time, each step would guide a person instead of a bot to complete the required activities. In this form of guided repair, the process properties would use descriptive text to tell the technician what tools to bring, where to go, and step by step instructions to fix the component. These text based steps could be displayed on a mobile app or take a more digital form via augmented reality (AR) glasses. Once the repair was completed, a tap of a button on a mobile app might make the API call needed to let the orchestrating twin know the job is done.

Digital Twins and Groups

Assembly Line

It’s easy to think of #DigitalTwins as representing discrete systems & subsystems, like an industrial #robot that builds a car in a factory. The reality is that physical entities like humans, machines & environmental systems don’t live in a vacuum. #IoT #IIoT

They often operate in larger systems of systems with relationships & interactions with other entities. If I were to collect a number of industrial robots that work together, I might create a “group” called “assembly line.” Unfortunately, using a simple group construct would do this collection of robots a disservice. The assembly line group should actually be a digital twin itself where its telemetry, virtual, static, and command properties have defined causal relationships with all the robots that comprise this assembly line.

There’s a parent/child relationship between the assembly line twin and all the robot twins. Furthermore, there are peer relationships between all the child robots. This literally brings the assembly line to life allowing you to monitor it via your IoT platform and analytics.

Collections of assembly line digital twins can then come together to create a “composite digital twin” called a factory.

Digital Twins & Subsystems

Engine

If you’ve ever worked with an #IoT platform, you might have noticed it typically has you define a simple schema or #DigitalTwin Model for an entire person, machine or environmental system. #IIoT

If the system you intend to monitor is simple enough, then a single digital twin instance may suffice. On the other hand, if what you’re monitoring is comprised of multiple, complex subsystems, you may have to go a bit further.

For instance, an automobile is actually a system made up of many subsystems including the engine, braking, transmission, electrical, & fuel subsystems just to name a few. Depending on complexity, it stands to reason that some of those subsystems deserve to be digital twins with telemetry, virtual, static & command properties of their own. Not only would these subsystem digital twins have a parent/child relationship with the overall car, they would have causal relationships with each other. If the engine doesn’t run when you start your car, the cause could be the battery, starter or alternator in the electrical subsystem.

Defined causal relationships between the engine & properties of the electrical subsystem would alert you to the correct cause. This helps you get prescriptive analytics.

The Digital Thread

Thread Spools

To create an historical record of what happens to an instance of a #DigitalTwin throughout its entire lifecycle, you represent this with something called a #DigitalThread. #IoT #IIoT

Beyond the IoT telemetry the digital twin captures from the physical entity, other significant events are captured via an ever-growing digital thread.

I’ll use an automobile to illustrate how this works. While it’s critical to have a car’s current and historical telemetry data captured & analyzed, there are other events that occur throughout the car’s life that result in a digital thread adding those events to the twin’s permanent record. Taking a car to the shop for an oil change, an accident report and repair, and performing routine service on the car all represent events that are manually added to the digital thread. You could also add pictures, 3D CAD models and other important information via this mechanism. Just imagine capturing a digital thread event where a particular type of car suffered a water pump failure at 60,000 miles. Sharing this information with all other cars of the same type would be invaluable.

In the end, this is how we tell the birth-to-retirement story of the physical entity represented by it’s digital twin.