Digital Twins Part 1: The Concept

Azure Digital Twins is a service that is used for building IoT friendly and intelligent solutions. A lot of clients have the need to model the relationship between devices and the space that they are in, which is where the Digital Twins comes in. The service markets itself as being able to help customers and clients be able to create comprehensive models based on physical environments along with graphs that model the relationship between people, places and the involved devices.

How did the concept of digital twins emerge in the first place?

For the past few years, several companies and industries have been making use of the Azure IoT platform to create novel and innovative applications to solve real-world problems. However, the digital world soon realized that context and specifics related to the physical world that devices interact with each other is key to being able to yield the most benefits from digital transformation. For this reason, with the passage of time more and more companies and clients are showing an increased interest in solutions that help create precise models related to the physical world, which eventually led to the emergence of the Digital Twins.

The digital twins is not a completely new concept, given that it has been around for quite some time especially in industrial use. However, it is now being used to model the physical environment that we dwell in using very specific and particular techniques. It helps model the extremely complicated interactions between people to create a comprehensive and efficient understanding of the world around us, so as to allow improvement to take place in our public and private spheres of life.

What is the impact of digital twins?

You might be curious to find out about the impact of digital twins and how it is being used in our world today. The Azure Digital Twins technology is can be used in a wide variety of environments such as warehouses, offices, schools, banks, malls, hospitals, factories, parks, parking lots, grids, stadiums, universities and virtually any physical environment that you could possibly imagine. Here are a few ways in which the digital twins can be used and is already impacting the world around us:

• To allow efficient allocation of space within public spaces such as offices.
• Allow surveillance and monitoring of paths taken by drones.
• Be able to identify autonomous vehicles and automobiles.
• Find which PoS terminal is the busiest in your supermarket or general store.
• Keep a record of temperatures across the state and how they vary.
• Estimate the maintenance requirements for the industry.
• Offer an in-depth analysis of how to best occupy a space.
• Offer an in-depth analysis of energy-related requirements for an electric grid.

The Takeaway…

It does not matter which physical environment or situation you want to see modeled, it is likely that Azure Digital Twins will be able to provide useful models and analysis through its own digital instance of the world that we live in.

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