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Twin Tools
Hello Everybody !!
First topic on the lovely new Twin Hub and good to see fellow enthusiasts get engaged.
I would be interested to know the types of tools people are using within their Digital Twin journeys and for what purpose, this is important as getting vendors included and supporting the IMF will be crucial success at scale.
A few tools we are using in Costain to get the discussion moving (non-exhaustive, only scratching the surface!) :
ArchiMate – We use this as the starting point aligned to the TOGAF architectural framework. This is really key as it starts with business outcomes / objectives and the required business architecture to support realising those outcomes. This then follows into the sexy technical architectures and associated data models, taking account of identity and access management, backups, archive etc etc
Bentley iTwin –Â A familiar offering from Bentley, we are using iTwin on a couple of projects as a data platform, linking design data to other operational systems, with an inclusion of real time data to come shortly!
Microsoft Azure –Â Perhaps not an obvious choice though very useful for enterprise scale data integration. Very effective for moving data around an organisation and driving insights, the same can be done with AWS, Bluemix or any of the other large platform providers. Modern cloud tools enable quick data integration from existing databases without any code or SQL queries, making this process very streamlined.
SCADA – often get overlooked though supervisory control and data acquisition solutions (Rockwell, Iconics, Schneider, Siemens etc) have been delivering real time digital twins (albeit in 2D) for decades. Modern variants allow full ERP integration so that operational information (alarms, events etc) can be linked directly to maintenance tools / schedules for example. Iconics and others have embraced BIM where models and associated info can be imported into SCADA to give amazing O&M capability that is real time by default.
We are driven by client demands and typically look to use what they have already, the key to scaled Digital Twin’s is really in the data standards (IMF) but also the integration architecture.
In the past I have worked on projects where standard visualisation objects, control code (function blocks), data models, design info and O&M info were all aligned to physical standard products. This is the absolute nirvana where the design, build, operate and maintain costs are all significantly reduced, delivering both a standardised physical asset and digital counterpart.
What tools do you use and for what purpose?
Do you look to create standard libraries or go for the bespoke option?
Be really interested to hear from others on this super exciting topic !!
Regards
KevinReevesDigi
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