: Alexander Meijers
: Hands-On Azure Digital Twins A practical guide to building distributed IoT solutions
: Packt Publishing
: 9781801073974
: 1
: CHF 27.30
:
: Hardware
: English
: 446
: DRM
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB

In today's world, clients are using more and more IoT sensors to monitor their business processes and assets. Think about collecting information such as pressure in an engine, the temperature, or a light switch being turned on or off in a room. The data collected can be used to create smart solutions for predicting future trends, creating simulations, and drawing insights using visualizations. This makes it beneficial for organizations to make digital twins, which are digital replicas of the real environment, to support these smart solutions.
This book will help you understand the concept of digital twins and how it can be implemented using an Azure service called Azure Digital Twins. Starting with the requirements and installation of the Azure Digital Twins service, the book will explain the definition language used for modeling digital twins. From there, you'll go through each step of building digital twins using Azure Digital Twins and learn about the different SDKs and APIs and how to use them with several Azure services. Finally, you'll learn how digital twins can be used in practice with the help of several real-world scenarios.
By the end of this book, you'll be confident in building and designing digital twins and integrating them with various Azure services.

Chapter 1: About Digital Twins


This chapter will explore the concept of a Digital Twin. ADigital Twin is a virtual representation of the real world combined with real-world data. Digital Twins can be used for a variety of scenarios. Digital Twins can be used to visualize insights or to simulate real-life situations by using a virtual representation and real-life sensory data. Learning about Digital Twins allows you to build solutions around these scenarios.

In this chapter, we'll go through several scenarios to understand Digital Twin implementations. We'll look at Microsoft's Azure Digital Twins service and how it allows us to model a Digital Twin. We'll walk through the layout of the service and how it is incorporated into the model of a Digital Twin. Part of that is a global overview of the architecture, which includes the relationship to other Azure services. This is required to create an actual Digital Twin solution. We will finish with an overview of the available SDKs and APIs for using Azure Digital Twins to create your own Digital Twin solutions. The chapter contains a lot of introductions to different services and tools that will appear again in the following chapters.

In this chapter, we'll go through the following topics:

  • Understanding the concept of the Digital Twin
  • Exploring the Digital Twin environment
  • Looking at real-world applications
  • Azure Digital Twins
  • Understanding the components of Azure Digital Twins architecture
  • Exploring Azure Digital Twins APIs

Understanding the concept of a Digital Twin


You have probably heard someone talking about Digital Twins in the last few years. You could even say that it has been a buzzword for some time. But since 2019-2020, it's become more than just a buzzword. Organizations and people have started to understand the benefits of having a Digital Twin. There has even been a large increase in organizations that want to start and implement a Digital Twin.

But what is a Digital Twin? I get that question a lot. And every time it is difficult to come up with an answer that others will understand. And even referring to the definition on Wikipedia will not make it easy to understand. There are a lot of different definitions you can find online in articles and blog posts. To explain what a Digital Twin is requires a definition to start with followed by a more in-depth explanation of the definition itself. I use the following definition:

A Digital Twin is a digital replica of entities and their relationships in a reality

You may have noticed that this definition contains several terms:digital replica