Blockchain-based Digital Twins on evan.network
Everyone talks about digitization and Industry 4.0. At evan.network, we also focus on this topic and aim to make digitization of real-world assets quite simple. That’s why today we are glad to introduce you to the brand new Digital Twin Creator.
“Evan.network provides all the required tools to equip your real-world good with a digital twin. The product is made digitally available, and associated information can be stored and exchanged tamper-proof. ”
Before learning more about the creator, let us first define, what a digital twin is and what makes it so special on evan.network.
A Digital Twin is a representation of an asset or a “physical thing”. At evan.network, we represent the Digital Twins directly and cryptographically secured on the blockchain. This enables the owner of the Digital Twin to manage and share all or only specific elements of her twin. If you are interested in more information about Digital Twins in general, you can read our latest blog post on this topic.
The Digital Twin Creator — An overview
With Digital Twins on evan.network, you can manage all the data of a real-world asset, that shall be exchanged with partners securely, in one place. In addition, you can integrate a Digital Twin into business transactions so that the physical asset becomes a real participant of the process.
To make the management of Digital Twins easy, we built a new management tool for them. After logging in to evan.network, you can see the new overview of your Digital Twins.
In the overview, you see all the twins that were created within your account. You also can manage your Plugins, which are basically templates for new types of Digital Twins, like a forklift or an electric car.
Initially, a Digital Twin on evan.network consists of only a name and a short description. We can compare it to a basic folder: After creation of the Digital Twin, you can provide this basic twin with additional data.
Digital Twins are empty per default and have no functionality, but you can add Plugins to them after their creation. A Plugin can provide different data schemes, which will be attached to the twin. It is also possible to add link to a custom web app, in which you can interact with the data stored on the Digital Twin, for example, to digitize a process flow.
Basically, Plugins can be compared with apps on your smartphone
A smartphone provides the storage and the operating system, which represent your created Digital Twin. When you install an app on your smartphone, you add custom functionality to it (for example, a calendar). Plugins attached to the twin provide a similar operating principle.
For instance, after you have created a Digital Twin for a forklift, you can add a Plugin called “Rental Calendar”. This Plugin defines data, set in the Digital Twin with a predefined scheme for the calendar entries.
Every data container within a twin can be shared with other parties. With this functionality, you can give partners access to the data in the Digital Twin. The data access can include read-only or read-and-write access mode to add or modify entries.
After data has been shared with an invited user, she or he gets a notification that access to a data container of another Digital Twin has been granted.
Imagine the following example: You want to list your forklift on a rental platform to achieve a higher utilization of the machine. Therefore, you share your “Calendar Plugin” to the platform with read-and-write access mode, so that the platform can list your forklift as available based on the calendar.
All these functionalities (creating twins, adding Plugins, sharing data sets) are not only limited to the UI, but are also available via the API in the evan.network open source library called “api-blockchain-core” (https://github.com/evannetwork/api-blockchain-core).
You can create new Digital Twins, bundle your own Plugins or attach them to your created Digital Twins. For the more experienced ones, it is even possible to build their own templates or Plugins for Digital Twins.
With the API, you can also mass import or synchronize more than one Digital Twin to the Blockchain and manage it on the UI.
If you want to get a deeper insight into the Digital Twin creator or learn how to alter the values via code, we have something very interesting for you:
We will host a webinar on 19th of June, where we plan to dive deeper in the functionalities of Digital Twins and their Plugins. Registrations can be done via eventbrite:
Check also out the latest news about the evan.network here.
