Introduction: As digital twinning technology enters the air, Huawei Cloud launched IoTA one-stop Internet of Things data analysis service to help enterprises build a bridge between the physical world and the virtual world.
With the development of Industry 4.0 and the Internet of Things, digital twin has become a hot topic of technology. Digital Twin combined with Huawei industrial intelligence, relying on big data analysis, can provide full-chain intelligent services in design, production, logistics, sales and service, and help enterprises build leading advantages with the help of new technologies by analyzing and mining data value.
For example, creating a digital twin for an industrial robot can display the Angle, speed, acceleration and other states of the robot arm in real time and accurately. According to the past and present state of the equipment, it can predict whether and when the system will fail in the future, which greatly improves the efficiency of service operation and maintenance, reduces the unplanned downtime of equipment, and saves the labor cost of field service.
What is digital twinning?
Digital Twin is a concept of "virtual digitization of physical products" proposed by Professor Michael Grieves of University of Michigan in product lifecycle management (PLM). With the continuous development of IT technology, the meaning of Digital Twin is also evolving. The current definition of NASA is: Digital Twin reproduces the shape, attribute, behavior and rule of the physical world through simulation by using physical model, real-time state, operation history and other data combined with empirical knowledge, maps and synchronously updates the status in virtual space, and reflects the whole life cycle process of objects in the physical world.
Through digital twin system, the whole process from product design, production planning to manufacturing execution can be digitized, improve product innovation and manufacturing efficiency; When we build a digital twin for a city, we can conduct real-time monitoring of the city's environment based on the twin model to optimize the city's resource utilization rate, realize intelligent traffic scheduling, etc., which will be a cool thing.
The key technology behind digital twinning
The key technologies behind digital twinning mainly include the following aspects:
· Digital model, virtual and real intercommunication.
The key of how to connect the physical world with the virtual world is to model the physical world, digitize the physical world through the model, and map the physical world to the virtual world through the model, so as to build a bridge between the physical world and the virtual world.
· Simulation and real-time synchronization.
In the actual production and operation stage of a product, its state will change in real time with materials, processes, personnel or environmental parameters, and the digital twin model needs to synchronize these changes in real time in the digital space.
· Data analysis and intelligent prediction.
Sensors in the physical world will generate a large amount of data in real time, which will be analyzed through machine learning, AI, etc., and combined with empirical knowledge to realize active anomaly detection and predictive maintenance. Help enterprises to make more accurate forecasts and reasonable decisions.
Through unified model language (DTML) modeling, support unified digital twin modeling and open ecological construction, and then build an interconnected digital world; Combine digital twinning with IoT devices and business systems in a scalable way to track the past and predict the future through simulation, real-time forecasting, combined with intelligent data analytics and AI services.
Huawei Cloud IoT helps build digital twin
Digital twinning is beautiful, but there are many challenges in implementing it.
First of all, the physical object to be modeled is often a very complex system. For example, to construct a digital twin of a production line for a steel mill, there are more than 6000 measurement points in one production line, and there are various complex relationships and interactions between the points. It is not easy to accurately describe this complex system in the digital world.
Second, real-time computing power is required. Because physical objects are constantly generating data, computing power is needed to map digital twins to physical objects in real time. For example, measuring points in the production line constantly report data with millisecond frequency, and there are thousands of real-time business indicators in the production line, which puts forward high requirements on the real-time computing ability of the model.
Huawei Cloud IoT data analysis service is centered on digital twin model and deeply integrated with asset model through standardized modeling language DTML. In data analysis operations, developers can easily reference the Internet of Things model data, and combine with Huawei Cloud industrial agent preset multiple algorithm models. Based on the industry and Huawei practice, customers can use it out of the box. Greatly improve the efficiency of data analysis.
Devices in the real world are not discrete, but have complex relationships between space, organization, people and context. How to connect the physical world with the digital world, how to better understand devices, and how to quickly and efficiently analyze data have become the basic business urgently needed by Internet of Things enterprises.
Huawei Cloud IoT data analysis service provides a set of open and easily extensible advanced modeling language DTML, which contains basic terms such as object attributes and secret event relations, and allows users to expand their own special terms in their own industry based on this basis, so as to facilitate users to accurately define the digital form of complex physical objects.
Taking buildings as an example, by building complex relationships between things and things, things and space, and things and people, the data of the Internet of Things is understood in the context of the model. Then, through the IoT+ asset model, the digital twin of real-time synchronization with the physical world is constructed in the digital world. Based on the model abstraction, a business-oriented uniform data basis can be provided for data analysis.
Example building digital model
Huawei Cloud IoT data Analysis provides powerful tools and capabilities to build a digital, intelligent infrastructure.
· Efficient visual modeling.
Huawei Cloud IoT data analysis service adopts the wySIwyg graphical model building method, which simplifies the development difficulty of complex digital twinning. It uses the tree-like hierarchical structure to describe the internal relationships of complex physical objects, such as spatial relationships, combination relationships, upstream and downstream relationships, etc. Virtual measurement points support rich computation operators, such as four arithmetical operation, scientific counting method, trigonometric function, sliding window, flow computation, etc. Support for defining asset model templates and fast replication.
· High-performance model engine.
Huawei Cloud IoT data analysis service provides a high-performance model engine with high concurrency and real-time computing capabilities. It can easily complete 100,000 level concurrent computing tasks to ensure that the digital twin model can map the best state in real time.
· Unified model incorporates multiple analytical capabilities.
Based on the digital twin model, Huawei Cloud IoT also provides the capability of spatio-temporal fusion analysis, so that users can conduct various data analysis based on digital twin in spatio-temporal dimensions. Meanwhile, Huawei Cloud IoT has preset AI docking interface, allowing developers to deploy AI with one click, enabling digital twins to be equipped with intelligent reasoning and constantly evolving capabilities.
Application example: Smart warehouse asset tracking
Huawei Cloud IoT data analysis service, with digital twin as the core, can realize the digital modeling of the warehouse and create one-stop data collection, cleaning, storage and analysis capabilities.
When an asset enters or leaves the warehouse, the RFID device automatically scans the RFID tag information on the asset and reports it to the cloud IoT platform. The cloud makes further data analysis through the digital twin model to judge the asset entry and exit status. The main operations include:
1) Verify whether assets are correct in and out according to incoming and outgoing orders, and provide on-site business kanban so that on-site operators can perceive the verification results of assets in and out in real time;
2) Asset entry and exit information statistics, asset status will be updated in real time according to the on-site business operation results, to meet the requirements of transparent asset entry and exit management.
Intelligent storage system
The omnidirectional perception of the physical world and the vast amount of data generated by the Internet gives us the foundation to build a real-time interactive digital world. Huawei Cloud IoT cloud services allow the Internet of Things data and twin models to fully combine, burst out unlimited imagination, to help enterprises in the process of digital transformation one step faster.
