Building Industrial Digital Twins: Design, develop, and deploy digital twin solutions for real-world industries using Azure Digital Twins

Great book on Digital Twins. The value of digital twins is very high in digital transformation of industrial operations. They no doubt will keep evolving and this book gave a very good overview of what they are and how to get started with them.

One of the most comprehensive, yet concise guides to digital twins I’ve seen. It covers the subject extremely well - starting from the conceptual, continuing all the way to the tactical, including detailed, concrete steps for testing, prototypes, deployment, and full-scale implementation. Highly recommended.

Take any 40 pages out this book and they will be useful to someone in your organization. It is very wide in its scope, yet detailed where you want to be. In that sense the title of the book does not do justice to the content. Software guys are the primary target but in our company the CEO, sales & marketing guys and the product manager all derived a great deal of value.The book is primarily a guide on how to build a DT from the ground up. It also covers the purpose, potential benefits and many other aspects of this important and fast-growing market. It has many useful graphics, for instance, one in particularly maps out all the main players and their specialties. The authors combine several styles in getting the information across: descriptive, explanatory and also instructional and they do each extremely well. These authors are obviously experts in their domain but are also gifted communicators. Highly recommended!

A wonderful book with the equal focus on business implications and technology underpinning for building and using digital twins as their use is becoming widesperad.The authors first explained the value creation in terms of higher sustainability and productivity in using Digital Twins in a wide range of industries. For example, how digital twins enable monitoring compliance with HSE (health, safety & environment) regulations, business model innovations for generating new recurring revenue, lowering manufacturing cost and generating higher revenue through reducing unplanned downtimeI liked the fact that the book always provides the business outcome of a digital twin solution before delving deep into technology. The authors pick a simple use case where someone is exploring to invest in building a digital twin of a slurry pump. One first identifies the problem (downtime of the mill caused by the cyclone slurry plump failures) and business benefits (in $ terms) of using the digital twin (e.g. minimizing revenue loss and saving of # of service trips) to determine the ROI. The authors have given specific examples of successful implementation of digital twins; for example, TANECO and ChemTech’s use of Digital Twin of the crude distillation unit (cdu) to optimize the oil fractionation process and AspenTech/Emerson’s use of Digital Twin for operational risk reduction.The authors also provide example of how a manufacturer may need to work with equipment provider to create digital twins. The book describes how Exelon works with Bentley Systems for their digital services for brownfield transmission and distribution using the OpenUtilities Digital Twin services for asset and network performance.The authors walk the readers through the entire development process of building digital twins and provide information on two choices of platforms (Asset Administration Shell (AAS), developed by Plattform Industrie 4.0 and the Digital Twin Definition Language (DTDL), an open-source initiative by Microsoft.I have suggestions for the authors for their second edition. One is to guide the readers on ownership of data; can the equipment OEM restrict the access to the data by their users (e.g. manufacturers). Another area will be the win-win business model for the equipment OEMs (who have specialized knowledge of the equipment) and the operators/users (who have specialized knowledge of various failures and contextual information) to cooperate since their interests are not aligned.

Review – Building Industrial Digital TwinsThe book makes the case for Digital Twins as essential tools in creating value, and their importance for companies large and small. In a short space it introduces a tremendous number of ideas and concepts in a clear concise way, serving as a guide and orientation to the world of Digital Twins. Where the book stands out is in its exposition of the nitty gritty of what it takes to start on the path of designing, building, and deploying Digital Twins at varying levels of complexity. In doing so it addresses not only technical issues but also the underlying questions faced by any organization – the ability to choose Digital Twin applications that are ready for prime time, that have well defined business cases, and that the organization has the capacity to implement and deliver. The book is well worth reading by both managers and the engineering staff directly responsible for implementation and operation. It is well organized for readability but at the cost of limited depth. There are two questions that the book leaves unanswered: what were the tradeoffs that led to the use of specific tools and services used and the construct of the overall implementation framework; and when can we satisfy the hunger to see a more complete work, or series of works, that do a deeper dive into the technical, management, and market aspects of adopting Digital Twins as a routine part of running an industrial business.Adam Drobot, Chairman, OpenTechWorks Inc.