Peek under the hood of Digital Twin – A system integration challenge
Traditionally Digital Twin has been a playing ground of organizations engaged in design simulation, 3-D visualization to analyse performance of products. Over the last years, both the scope and objectives to realize Digital Twin has changed substantially, resulting in collation of data sources from various system. Moreover, enterprises have made substantial investments to build their backend IT systems, housing valuable company data over the last three decades. The current trend is to drive digital transformation by leveraging new technologies and monetizing backend data to address the challenges stemming out of globalization, individualization, collaboration, and new business models. Making these solutions repeatable is key, which has essentially seen the emergence of the Digital Platform strategy.
Digital Twin Platform – A game changer
A Digital Twin platform brings together all related digital threads, both from the virtual world and real world, driven by industry specific requirements, data standards and terminologies. These digital threads could either be from enterprise applications (IT), field/shop-floor (OT) or human/machine semantics (ST). Digital Twin platform establishes a contextual relationship between these digital threads creating a 360-degree mapping of an asset or process. Correlated events and analytic trends coupled with artificial intelligence / machine learning helps put together a reliable decision-making system or even autonomous solution to help optimizing business KPI. Business objectives could range from asset availability, inventory cost and operation cost (OEE), service optimization or even energy optimization and decarbonization.
Digital Platform strategy helps realize repeatable solutions.
Atos’ Digital Twin platform contextually binds digital threads from virtual and real world.
Are you ready to start your “Digital Twin journey” with a trusted system integration partner?
System integrator role in realizing Digital Twin
Digital Twin Platform offers business-critical application through microservice-based modular architecture that can integrate data from various sources namely, structured, graph or unstructured data of diverse formats including numeric, text, sound, image or even video feed. Structured data sources would range from applications such as PDM, APM, MES, SCM or ERP systems, depending on the business domain. Unstructured data would essentially be field operational or shop-floor data (IoT) from sensors. Semantic data are reasoning data from expert knowledge or entity relationships as knowledge graphs.
The challenge of the system integrator is to contextualize these diverse data sources, describing the same asset or process constituting the Digital Twin meta model. The Digital Twin platform manages this Meta model and extends it to perform simple analytics extending up to artificial intelligence/ machine learning for external domain experts to realize a true citizen service model. Extension of a platform to perform simulation, visualize in real-time even helps perform a 'What-if analysis' thereby providing options to increase the life of an asset. Cybersecurity has remained as a single biggest challenge to provide secure access via polices and role-based access. Under the hood of Digital Twin one can integrate topics such as robotic process automation, augmented reality and many more adding to the complexity.
Are you ready to start your “Digital Twin journey” without a trusted system integration partner?
By Murli Mohan Srinivas
Digital Twin Business Owner / Head Industry 4.0 - Germany
Posted on January 8
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