Amazon Web Services has announced AWS IoT TwinMaker, a new service that lets developers create digital twins of real-world systems to monitor and optimize operations. Digital twins are virtual representations of physical systems such as buildings, production lines and equipment that are regularly updated with real-world data to mimic the structure, state and behavior of the systems they represent. Twins connect data from different data sources including sensors, video feeds and business applications, ‘without having to move the data into a single repository’. TwinMaker also provides a framework into which data from other data sources such as Snowflake and Siemens MindSphere can flow. A digital twin graph shows the relationships between virtual representations of physical systems and connected data sources.
Existing 3D models such as CAD files and point cloud scans can be
imported into the ‘spatially aware visualization’ along with video and
sensor data overlays from connected sources, insights from machine
learning and simulation services and equipment maintenance records and
manuals. A plugin for Amazon Managed Grafana provides a configurable GUI for end users such as plant operators and maintenance engineers. More in the release.
Amazon would appear to be playing catchup with Microsoft whose Azure Digital Twin platform offers a similar service for the creation of graph-based twins of ‘buildings, factories, farms, energy networks, railways, stadiums, and more—even entire cities’. Entire cities? Why not the whole country, as per the UK’s ambitious National Digital Twin program, already being used to ‘tackle the climate emergency’.
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