Creating Real-Time Digital Twins for Manufacturers

Digital Twins are revolutionizing the world of manufacturing, mirroring the physical attributes of the factory floor in the virtual world to drive real business value.

A Digital Twin is created using a network of sensors, cameras and other data collection tools that feed a live model in the virtual world. Within a manufacturing environment, that model could represent an entire production facility, an individual machine or asset in that facility or a specific product.

This Digital Twin brings many benefits to manufacturers, allowing them to test and validate production decisions, visualize products, commission and trouble-shoot machines and connect separate systems or processes - all without wasting any physical time or resources.

So, how can you build a Digital Twin for a manufacturing application?

Building Digital Twins with Alibaba Cloud Industrial Brain

To create a Digital Twin for any environment, you need data. Within the dynamic world of manufacturing, you need to be able to process and evaluate that data in real-time to optimize your production environment.

Our Industrial Brain initiative is breaking down the barriers to data collection to help create real-time Digital Twins. It achieves this by linking all the data on a production line to a brain, for central management and real-time feedback.

For example, think of a standard manufacturing process. An Industrial Brain could collect real-time data from the production line, incorporate it with historical data and use all this information to feed a Digital Twin.

The system could then recommend optimal processing parameters. As a result, you could reduce your energy consumption and increase your yield.

That's not all. Alibaba Cloud Industrial Brain is capable of transforming industrial devices to autonomously diagnose issues, make production decisions and self-configure to enable the intelligent industry.

What's more, it is constantly evolving because the more data is has, the smarter it becomes.

ET Industrial Brain has already helped customers including Trina Solar raise the ratio of its grade-A products by seven percent and it has increased cell wafer yield by one percent for GCL Power.

Going to the Edge

Speed is of the essence for manufacturing-based Digital Twins. This is where edge computing can help, by seamlessly collecting, processing and analyzing your data in real-time.

In edge computing, data is not uploaded directly to the cloud or a centralized data processing repository. Instead, it uses a series of edge nodes to process data close to the data collection source.

Our Edge Node Service (ENS) provides these edge computing capabilities, coupled with the elasticity of the cloud.

Compared with a centralized cloud service, ENS not only lessens the load on both your network and servers, it also expedites the real-time collection and processing of your data.

Conclusion

The challenges most manufacturing facilities face today are addressed by our powerful ET Industrial Brain and ENS solutions, which together provide a smart, scalable and efficient way to utilize Digital Twins to make your physical production facilities future-ready, today.

To learn more about the capabilities of Alibaba Cloud Industrial Brain, please visit https://www.alibabacloud.com/et/industrial

Disclaimer: The information presented in this blog is for reference only, intended to give readers a better understanding of the capabilities of Digital Twins. Alibaba Cloud does not engage in data collection without customers' consent.

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Creating Real-Time Digital Twins for Manufacturers

Building Digital Twins with Alibaba Cloud Industrial Brain

Going to the Edge

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