Concept: Amazon Web Services (AWS) has introduced ‘IoT TwinMaker’ to help developers create digital twins of real-world systems such as factories, buildings, industrial equipment, and production lines easily and quickly. It enables developers to aggregate data from a variety of sources, such as video cameras, equipment sensors, and business applications, into a knowledge graph that mimics the real-world environment. This can help businesses to improve operational efficiency and reduce downtime in their processes.

Nature of Disruption: AWS IoT TwinMaker provides built-in data connectors for AWS services such as ‘AWS IoT SiteWise’ for equipment and time-series sensor data, ‘Amazon Simple Storage Service’ (S3) for storage of visual resources, ‘Amazon Kinesis Video Streams’ for video data and data from business applications. It also includes a framework for building custom data connectors that can be used with other data sources like Snowflake and Siemens MindSphere. The platform creates a digital twin graph that combines and comprehends the relationships between virtual representations of the physical systems and connected data sources, allowing users to mimic any real-world environment accurately. The customers can use 3D tools to construct and arrange 3D scenes of a physical location and its contents by importing existing 3D models such as CAD files and point cloud scans. Also, this allows them to add dynamic video and sensor data overlays from linked data sources, insights from connected ML and simulation services, and equipment maintenance records and manuals to create a spatially-aware visualization of their operations.

Outlook: Digital twins are virtual representations of physical systems that are regularly updated with real-world data to mimic the structure, state, and behavior of the systems they represent. Although there are numerous and diverse digital twin use cases, most clients seemingly want to get started by quickly leveraging their existing data to gain a better understanding of their operations. AWS IoT TwinMaker aims to help developers create and use digital twins of real-world systems to monitor and optimize operations more quickly and easily. The users can employ digital twins to generate a comprehensive perspective of operations by combining existing data from multiple sources, creating virtual representations of any physical location, and combining existing 3D models with real-world data. AWS IoT TwinMaker is presently available as a preview in the US East (North Carolina), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Singapore), with additional AWS regions to follow. Customers and partners who use AWS IoT TwinMaker include Carrier, Siemens, and Accenture.

This article was originally published in Verdict.co.uk