Let’s talk about digital twins.
In the world of all things IIoT (a.k.a. the Industrial Internet of Things), digital twins have emerged as industry game-changers. The first time I read about digital twins, an apt comparison to Google Maps (or even Google Earth) was drawn. Google Maps “twins” our surroundings, in a sense, and process real-time data which is used in myriad use cases.
So do – in IIoT – digital twins designed for equipment management, manufacturing, the simulation of products, etc. These virtual replicas mimicking physical objects or systems can also be used to monitor and optimize the performance of sensors and machinery, to predict when a human worker may need to intervene and complete manual maintenance, and even to sophisticatedly incorporate AI and machine-learning (ML) algorithms to enable proactive and autonomous decision-making.
The long story short? With digital twins comes great potential. According to principal futurist Frank Diana, “We’re going to see digital twins adopted rapidly in 2023 in many different industries. The volatility and uncertainty that’s on the horizon for this year will serve as a catalyst to drive companies into a mode of rehearsing for uncertain futures. Digital twins will be a critical tool for that rehearsal.”
Enter Litmus, an industrial edge data platform that works with the likes of Microsoft, HPE, Dell, Intel, Google Cloud and others. Last week, Litmus announced the availability of its digital twins for users of Litmus Edge and Litmus Edge Manager. With these now available, manufacturers will be able to streamline the collection, contextualization, and analyzation of data with visual representations of purpose-driven digital twin models.
As Litmus wrote about digital twins in late 2022, “Digital transformation is a moving target. Digital twins have always been part of this, though. They are part of our vision and part of our wider AI and IIoT work to help manufacturers use their data to truly work smarter.”
Litmus works to continually improve its platform with customer-sourced features and best practices in data aggregation in order to hit maturity benchmarks for real digital transformations. Litmus Edge and Litmus Edge Manager play a big role in this effort. Here are the long-story-short points to understand:
- Litmus Edge, purpose-built for Industry 4.0, unifies data collection and analytics for application enablement. Litmus Edge makes it easy to harness this data in order to power insights.
- With instant connectivity to hundreds of operational technology (OT) assets, it’s a rapid-to-deploy and easy-to-use offering.
- Operations managers can access pre-built or custom data visualizations, KPI dashboards, and analytics at the edge to improve OEE, reduce downtime and optimize throughput.
- Applications can be hosted in a public or private marketplace.
- Deployments become much more flexible in OT or IT any infrastructure.
- Litmus Edge Manager is a centralized edge management platform designed to give teams visibility, access and control over the orchestration of edge device, data, applications and ML models at scale.
- Via a single point of control, IIoT deployments become simplified.
- Users can control, configure, update and monitor IIoT devices across all sites (and remotely) to remove the need for on-site management.
- Containerized applications can also be ran on any Litmus Edge device to achieve centralized control over how they are hosted, deployed and updated.
“The OT and IT stack is getting more dynamic and complicated,” said Vatsal Shah, co-founder and CEO of Litmus. “Realizing the potential of digital twins at scale in the industry now requires an integrated approach that extends beyond the factory floor, across the enterprise, and with various cloud, consortium-driven or legacy asset frameworks.”
“Our core intellectual property was our ability to collect data from any industrial source, normalize and contextualize it and analyze it at the edge in real time,” added Vishvesh Shah, Director of Product Management at Litmus. “Digital twins are logical extensions of our solution in helping customers scale up in repeatable ways.”
Edited by
Greg Tavarez
