Create your digital twin on a cloud — AWS IoT Twinmakaer

Visualize your real-world processes in a virtual world

Hey, I found a secret to share. Do you know you can now create a digital twin in AWS?

Wait, what? really?

A new service is introduced to the Amazon Web Services family. AWS IoT TwinMaker, a service added for users to create digital twins on the cloud.

What is Digital Twin?

“Digital twin is Virtual Representation of Physical System which regularly updates with real-world data and mimics the structure”

If the definition isn’t clear, let me make it simple for you.

• Digital Twins collects data from real-world sensors, cameras, and enterprise applications
• Digital Twins use collected data for: Tracking your physical factory, building, or industrial plant.
• Digital Twin is used for: Monitoring operations, diagnosing and correcting eros, and optimizing operations.

How does a digital twin work?

It’s a necessity for us to see the doors aws iot twin maker opens for ML Engineers, Robotics Developers, and many more…

Key ingredients to create a digital twin are: Model devices, equipment, spaces, and processes in a physical location.

The recipe to create a digital twin is as follows:

Step 1: Connecting your physical system to data sources

[Data sources can be: contextual information, sensor data, or camera feeds]

Step 2: Create a visualization of the analytics for users to get insights into the process

Step 3: Create a digital twin for end-users to make better business decisions

To achieve the above-given steps AWS IoT TwinMaker has the following features

1. Entity component system knowledge graph:
   ⇒ Just like we create an entire software or a system from the flow-chart and ER diagrams, an Entity Component System can be used to create a model or create a representation of your physical system using the entity-component-based knowledge graph and entity-component architecture. Knowledge Graph also allows us to connect data from different locations and has built-in data connectors for data stored in AWS IoT SiteWise and Kinesis Video Streams.
2. Scene Composer
   ⇒ If you have seen platforms like Unity, Nvidia Create, Blender, etc Scene composer looks similar to those but it has some limitations compared to these platforms. As the name states, it can be used to compose a scene using lighting and imported 3D Objects but can’t be used to create 3D Objects.
3. Applications:
   ⇒ Grafana & Amazon Managed Grafana — For end users

Apart from these 3, there are other Key Components as well in AWS IoT TwinMaker

Workspace
Entity-Component model
Entity
Data Source
Property
Visualization
Scenes
Resources
Augmented User Interface

You can find the detailed description of AWS IoT Twinmaker at what-is-twinmaker.

Let’s just see how we can play with aws-iot-twinmaker by creating a workspace.

create-workspace.webm

To create a workspace you can go through the following steps on Twinmaker-gs-workspace
To create an entity you can go through the following steps on twinmaker-gs-entity

Where can we use AWS IoT Twinmaker?

Can it be used for cooking? It’s a stupid question with an obvious answer NO. But Technically it is used in a cookie-making factory to keep a check on whether the production unit is working up to the mark or not. This was just one example.

AWS IoT Twinmaker allows the creation of a digital twin of any industrial unit or physical process or business model.

AWS IoT Twinmaker has applications like grafana to present the analytics of the ongoing process. It will allow owners to diagnose errors and optimize operations which can profit the business model.

Just like AWS IoT Twinmaker, Azure provides a platform to create a digital twin but GCP is yet to enter this competition.

In a nutshell,

Managing a huge business process or industry is difficult when it comes to monitoring issues and analytics of the system. But if one can have insights into the entire system in the digital world it will be really easy to manage. Huge companies like Cognizant and Siemens [ partners ] have already started setting up their plans in the aws iot twinmaker for getting the relief in maintaining their business. What are you waiting for?

Reference Links :

You can check out an amazing video to get a detailed explanation of functionalities added as a part of the service aws iot twinmaker Introduction to AWS IoT Twinmaker.
You can find all the materials and blog links by AWS at aws-iot-twinmaker-resource.
You can also refer to your faqs at aws-iot-twinmaker-faqs.

Credits:
A whole-heartedly thanks to our team and especially Shailja for contributing to this article.