Since 2014, the Industry IoT Consortium (IIC) has strived to build a strong technical foundation for all things IIoT. (The Industrial Internet of Things, of course.) With services designed to help drive business value in IT, networks, academia and research, manufacturing, energy, utilities, healthcare and more, the IIC’s mission and best-practice frameworks are built to help members get the most out of their transformative “of Things” (and “of Everything”) investments.
In that vein, the IIC published a new report earlier this month that aptly reflects (and builds on) this mission. “The Digital Twin Core Conceptual Models and Services Technical Report” guides technical decision-makers, system engineers, software architects, and modelers about connecting the foundational IT infrastructure with industry-specific business applications powered by digital twins in IIoT settings.
Digital twins, indeed, are proving transformative as the technology landscape expands. As we know, digital twins are basically virtual clones of products or entire systems, even. These replicas bridge the physical and digital worlds, allowing experts to test, analyze, and optimize in simulated virtual spaces.
Thus, the IIC’s report describes these points; digital twin fundamental concepts and their basic requirements, their core conceptual models and services, and the existing architectures and business applications they can support.
The report also goes on to describe high-level technical considerations in implementing the digital twin core layer, specifically. (There’s even information included from the separate Digital Twin Consortium. Readers can avail this from the DTC here.)
The IIC’s report is rounded out with a survey of relevant standards that can be as input for standards development for digital twins.
“Digital transformation often involves creating synchronized virtual representations of real-world entities, or digital twins,” said Shi-Wan Lin, CTO of Yo-i Information Technologies, and one of the report's co-authors. “A shared understanding of the core models and services of digital twins simplifies the design of business applications powered by interoperable digital twins across various industries. This technical report aims to address this goal.”
“Digital twins are becoming more prevalent in a wide variety of industries such as manufacturing, construction, smart city, healthcare, business. However, the ecosystem of digital twins has not been well established,” said Guodong Shao, Computer Scientist, Project Manager, Digital Twins for Advanced Manufacturing at NIST and one of the co-authors of the report. “Developing and integrating digital twins presents significant challenges. This document covers provisions for requirements and possible solutions for Standards Development Organizations to further develop standardized frameworks, reference models, and interface specifications to help ensure digital twin interoperability, reliability, validity, security and trust.”
Readers can request the IIC report’s full details here.
Edited by
Greg Tavarez
