End-to-end ready PaaS platform services, three dimensions to understand the Azure digital twin

The editor said: Welcome to the special edition of Microsoft's CIIE! The 2021 China International Import Expo is about to begin. Since the beginning of this year, the metaverse has spread all over the world, and the term "Metaverse" is derived from the science fiction novel "Snow Crash" published in 1992, which describes a networked virtual reality world. In this virtual reality, people appear in images designed by themselves, engage in activities that exist or do not exist in the real world like playing games, and can interact with the real world.

Looking back, the sudden popularity of a sci-fi concept like "Meta Universe" is not only related to the development of virtual reality technology, the more realization of digital space, and the increasing integration of digital space and real space, but it also reflects such a new development direction behind it. , That is, the combination of the Internet of Things and industrial digitization has become an irreversible trend. Especially with the help of new technologies such as digital twins, enterprises can use visual means to solve the complex application architecture, scattered management tools, and recognition in digital transformation. In order to speed up the pace of digital transformation, it is necessary to understand the problems of low efficiency, lack of panoramic analysis and control ability.

For this reason, Gartner has previously listed digital twins as one of the top ten emerging technologies for three consecutive years (2017-2019). According to an IDC report, by the end of 2020, 65% of manufacturing companies will use digital twins to operate For products and/or assets, 25% of enterprises hope to use digital twins to reduce the cost of quality defects and service delivery. It can be seen that digital twins have huge application prospects and space in the digital transformation of enterprises.

In this process, as an explorer and promoter in the field of Internet of Things and digital twins, through years of technology precipitation and practical verification, Microsoft has also created a set of end-to-end-ready Azure Digital Twins (Azure Digital Twins) services. Today, more and more companies can use domain expertise based on Azure digital twins to build customized connectivity solutions to better promote product improvement, operational optimization, cost reduction, and breakthroughs in customer experience.

So, what is Microsoft's Azure digital twin service? As the current market-leading end-to-end ready digital twin PaaS service, what are the unique advantages of Azure digital twin service? More importantly, under the "blessing" of the Azure digital twin, what new technologies, new capabilities and new services can companies build?

Leveraging the new fulcrum of the enterprise's digital transformation

At present, there are many different definitions and understandings of digital twins in academia and business circles, but fundamentally speaking, digital twins are the dynamic presentation and feedback of the past and current behaviors or processes of a physical entity in a digital form. Its real function is to be able to establish a quasi-real-time relationship between the physical world and the digital world in an all-round way, and this is where its greatest value lies.

At the same time, over the past period of time, with the acceleration of "new infrastructure", in the digital transformation of the construction industry and smart cities, information is often realized through the use of BIM (Building Information Modeling) or CIM (City Information Modeling) technology. These technologies also have the capabilities of full-domain, full-time, precise mapping, virtual and real interaction, simulation and simulation, and have also become necessary new infrastructures in the fields of construction, real estate, smart cities, etc. under the “new infrastructure”.

Although with the help of technologies such as BIM or CIM, it is indeed possible to “visualize” the physical world in the fields of architecture, buildings, cities, etc., coupled with the application of 3D models, this makes many people mistakenly believe that virtual visualization based on 3D models is a digital twin. However, Microsoft believes that "visualization" is only an application scenario of digital twins. The essence of digital twins is to reflect in the digital world the physical objects in the real world, the interaction between physical objects, and the interaction between them. Objects participate in driven business processes and combine various real-time data to build true digital twin applications to solve the actual problems of the enterprise. Therefore, how to use the Internet of Things technology to obtain data from the physical world, how to use data to establish a digital twin model of the physical environment, to achieve efficiency improvement and optimization in the fields of enterprise operation, product development and design, and production process flow, so that enterprises can truly adopt new technologies Obtaining tangible business value is the most important direction and purpose of the digital twin.

Indeed, the reason why digital twins are "hot" today has become a key tool for the entire market, especially in areas such as the industrial Internet and enterprise intelligent manufacturing, to optimize the entire manufacturing value chain and innovate new products. In the final analysis, digital twins can truly help physical assets to achieve The important entry point from "hidden" to "obvious" gives enterprises the opportunity to see the specific conditions that are happening now or that may occur in the future of physical assets, so as to realize their effective monitoring, predictive analysis and optimization.

For example, in product development, engineers can benefit from digital twins because it helps test the feasibility of upcoming products before launch; in terms of design customization, digital twins can also help companies design multiple types of products , And provide its customers with personalized products and services; in terms of workshop performance improvement, digital twins also help monitor and analyze finished products, helping engineers find defects and low-performance products in batches; in addition, in predictive maintenance On the one hand, digital twins can help manufacturers predict the potential machine downtime and improve overall production efficiency by minimizing the time of non-value-added maintenance activities.

From this perspective, not only has a single digital twin technical service capability, but also a digital twin that can be integrated with various digital platform technologies to build a cross-industry and end-to-end ready digital The open platform service of the twin solution is ; at the same time, it is not only suitable for industries such as smart manufacturing and smart buildings. Its open digital twin service capability can be "reused" to the medical, agricultural, education, energy and other industries, thereby giving Can and accelerate the digital transformation of enterprises in all walks of life.

It is not difficult to find that the digital twin technology can solve the problem of the connection and interaction between the digital world and the physical world that has plagued people for a long time. It makes full use of data, models, intelligence and integrates multi-disciplinary technologies. It can not only simulate the small to one in the digital world. A few screws, as large as a city, and even various sophisticated equipment, so it not only has a strong application value, but also a new fulcrum for leveraging the digital transformation of enterprises.

Understanding Azure Digital Twins in Three Dimensions

It is also the insight into this new change. As an explorer and promoter of the Internet of Things and digital twins, Microsoft has also launched the Azure digital twin service "advancing with the times". It is not only Microsoft’s role in cloud computing, IoT The "integrator" in technological innovation fields such as, data modeling, artificial intelligence, mixed reality, etc., is Microsoft's end-to-end ready PaaS service platform after long-term technology precipitation and practical verification in the field of digital twins. Specifically:

First, input link Azure digital twin services in (the INPUT) , the user can make use of Microsoft's strong technical strength in the field of things, interconnected physical environment of man, machine, material, including through the use of Microsoft Azure to close Regulatory, security and privacy advantages build enterprise-level IoT connectivity solutions, and integrate with Azure IoT Hub to monitor, manage, and update IoT devices with a high level of security and scalability, so that users can be safe and reliable Connect millions of devices and their back-end solutions, and almost any device can be connected to Azure IoT Hub; in addition, through Workflow integration and REST APIs, users can also complete workflow integration and business systems/ Service integration provides the Azure digital twin service with real-time and modeling data needed for digital twin applications.

Secondly, in the real-time execution environment (LIVE EXECUTION ENVIRONMENT) of the Azure digital twin service. can be used by users to define and create any domain reflecting their real-world environment through the Open Digital Twins Definition Language provided by Microsoft. The digital twin customizes the domain model, and creates the entity of the model in the digital twin service according to the definition of the model, and constructs a digital twin map that reflects the real world. At the same time, using the Azure Digital Twins Explorer (Azure Digital Twins Explorer), you can intuitively visualize the Azure Digital Twins Graph (Azure Digital Twins Graph), so that you can interact with users in a more direct and intuitive way in a graphical form ( Mainly developers) interaction.

Among them, the open digital twin modeling language provided in the Azure digital twin service uses the JSON-LD language for model definition, referred to as DTDL. It can describe the digital twin model based on attributes, telemetry, commands, components, and relationships. On this basis, with the help of the REST API and SQL-like query engine provided by its real-time execution environment, it is convenient to construct a digital twin entity based on the established digital twin model to establish a digital twin graph that fully reflects the real environment. At the same time, the Azure digital twin provides a rich event system, which enables the digital twin graph entity to keep up with changes in data processing and business logic. Users can also use its event output port to connect to external analysis and computing resources (such as Azure Functions) to provide flexibility and self-reliance. Define ways to drive data analysis and processing. In addition, users can also use the powerful API query function provided by Azure Digital Twins to extract "insights" from the real-time execution environment, including attribute values, relationships, relationship attributes, model information, etc., and then display the digital twin's real-time Value.

Finally, in the output link (OUTPUT) Azure digital twin service. Users can also use the innovative technology provided by Azure to obtain more comprehensive and multi-dimensional product data, allowing enterprises to achieve greater insight and analysis capabilities. This guides companies to make corresponding business decisions.

Specifically, users can connect Azure digital twins to time series insights (TSI) to track the time series history of each twin, and can also align the time series model in the time series insights with the source in the Azure digital twin; at the same time, users can also Store Azure digital twin data in Azure Data Lake; in addition, users can also analyze Azure digital twin data by using Azure Synapse Analytics or other data analysis tools provided by Microsoft, and can integrate larger workflows with logic applications, and finally let Digital twin services play a greater role and value.

In other words, through the end-to-end-ready Azure digital twin service platform provided by Microsoft, companies can realize digital twin applications in various application scenarios such as production process control and optimization in factories, and energy management and optimization in building real estate. Solution. In addition, Microsoft will also connect Azure Digital Twin Service with various experience terminals and applications, such as Web applications, mobile APP, MR, Office365, etc., to achieve a variety of different user experiences, thus providing a complete set A comprehensive digital twin-based solution.

It is worth mentioning that, compared with other solutions on the market, Azure Digital Twin has three unique advantages: First, it is not only the industry's first end-to-end ready digital twin service, but also the industry's first. Realize the landing digital twin service; second, Azure digital twin is also a PaaS platform service. The greatest value of "PaaSization" is that users can "get it out of the box", so they have more time to focus on business In terms of innovation, and through the "PaaS-based" delivery method, users can improve efficiency while reducing overall TCO costs; third, Azure digital twins can both empower developers and provide developers with modeling languages and digital Services such as the twin map can more empower end users, allowing users to "build is what you get", and maximize the new value brought by digital twins.

It can be seen that through a comprehensive interpretation of the technical capabilities provided by Azure Digital Twins, Azure Digital Twins is a truly end-to-end ready digital twin PaaS service. Experience and practice in the fields of Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, digital twins, etc. At the same time, it also starts from the source of the actual needs of the enterprise and brings new technologies and new services closer to users. It is a "true name" digital twin service platform based on the user's perspective , Not only for enterprises to widely use digital twins, and realize more digital business innovations based on digital twins, but also provide brand-new choices and brand-new experiences.
Take the digital twin experience "to the next level"

So, why is it said that Azure Digital Twin is not only a new technology and new service, but also a brand-new experience? The core behind it is Microsoft HoloLens mixed reality technology, which can work with digital twin services to provide a more intuitive data overlay and stereoscopic visual effect, which can be used in different application scenarios such as operation training, remote collaboration and support, and maintenance inspection. Enterprise business personnel can also use the "visual" standard front-end products to quickly understand and integrate into the digital twin for practical work, and ultimately achieve the goals of business optimization and efficiency improvement.

In fact, in the end-to-end-ready Azure digital twin service provided by Microsoft, the digital twin mixed reality service based on HoloLens is just like the "jewel in the crown", no matter in the form of presentation or in actual application scenarios. The role played is not only very "cool", but also can bring unprecedented new experience.

And more importantly, around the implementation of the Azure digital twin mixed reality service, the Microsoft Azure intelligent cloud platform also provides a lot of support, including front-end mixed reality access support, as well as digital signal collection or equipment in the physical world. At the same time, Microsoft can also provide different storage services according to different data types, and use data warehouses to do some data analysis services, and finally form a very good user-end experience. Therefore, Microsoft Azure Intelligence The interaction and supporting services between the cloud platform and Hololens are not only very leading, but also at the forefront of the industry.

In general, in the field of digital twins, Microsoft not only provides a ready-made Azure digital twin PaaS service platform, but also helps every industry and every company integrate and simplify what they need through a unique "cloud + terminal" interactive new experience. All of this has truly built a solid foundation for innovation for enterprises to realize business innovation with the help of digital twin services and accelerate digital transformation. This is also a true portrayal of Microsoft's always leading the era in the field of digital twins and creating an era.

Don't go away! And benefits

After reading this article, do you have a better understanding of Microsoft's Azure digital twin? Come and scan the code to make an appointment to watch the live broadcast of the Microsoft booth at the CIIE, which will show you all the world's leading technology application cases and innovative solutions!

In addition, there will be industry giants coming! Don't move your fingers quickly, make an appointment for live broadcast, and listen to the experts' analysis of how companies can break the situation in a carbon-neutral environment!