AWS has launched a service to simplify creating digital twins of real-world systems such as factories, industrial equipment and production lines.

AWS IoT TwinMaker can integrate data from multiple sources such as equipment sensors, video cameras, and business applications, combining that data to create a knowledge graph that models the real-world environment.

Siemens, Carrier, and INVISTA among customers and partners using AWS IoT TwinMaker

“Sensors for equipment, buildings, and industrial processes are proliferating and generating massive amounts of data. Customers are increasingly eager to use that data to optimise their operations and processes and one way to do that is using digital twins, but they find that building a digital twin and custom applications is difficult, time consuming, and prohibitively expensive to maintain today,” said Michael MacKenzie, General Manager, IoT at AWS. “With AWS IoT TwinMaker, customers can now derive previously unavailable insights about their operations that inform real-time improvements to their buildings, factories, industrial equipment, and production lines, and make accurate predictions about system behaviour with minimal effort.”

Siemens Digital Industries Software is an early adopter of IoT TwinMaker. “Through this collaboration, we can leverage AWS IoT TwinMaker and other AWS services within the low-code, data management, visualisation, simulation, and industrial IoT applications in our Xcelerator portfolio, making it easier for customers to create digital twin solutions that can scale from the simplest to the most complex use cases,” said Brenda Discher, Senior Vice President for Global Strategy & Marketing, Siemens Digital Industries Software. “Together, we are helping our customers increase manufacturing productivity and flexibility, optimise material costs, and better meet their energy and sustainability goals.”

A subsidiary of Koch Industries, INVISTA is a specialty materials producer, with its products used in clothing, carpets, cars, and computers. “INVISTA is using AWS IoT TwinMaker to help our field personnel efficiently address operational notifications and alerts from plant floors across multiple, distributed locations,” said Jerry Grunewald, Vice President of Operations Transformation at INVISTA. “With AWS IoT TwinMaker, we can quickly and easily build a digital twin of our manufacturing operations to give field workers a consolidated view of all assets and operational data. By doing so, INVISTA operations is making significant progress on our vision of the connected worker as the outcome of our transformation effort. For example, a field technician could pinpoint the source of equipment anomalies and identify appropriate corrective actions.”

A provider of intelligent building and cold chain solutions, Carrier is another early adopter of IoT TwinMaker. “At Carrier, we are pushing to drive more innovation and connectivity to make buildings and the cold chain more sustainable, efficient, and comfortable. To enable rapid development of more digital solutions, we embarked on the development of a shared services platform—carrier.io—as the foundation of all Carrier digital services,” said Dan Levine, Senior Director IoT, Cloud, and Software Engineering at Carrier. “AWS IoT services will be a key enabler to accelerating the development of our carrier.io IoT platform, and AWS IoT TwinMaker will be used to provide critical asset modelling for the platform, enabling our applications to easily create and integrate digital twins of real-world systems. These applications allow our customers to use their data alongside advanced machine learning and data analytics to decrease service costs, optimise maintenance schedules, and increase reliability, efficiency, and profitability of their Carrier equipment.”

Other early adopters include Australian multi-modal transport specialist John Holland; Element, an OT analytics specialist; digital twin developer FuseForward; engineering and OT consultancy Radix; and spatial data specialist Matterport.

“Built with industrial organisations in mind, Element Unify uses automated, no-code data pipelines to integrate and contextualise IT/OT metadata and then stores relationships within the Unify Graph,” said Andy Bane, CEO at Element. “AWS IoT TwinMaker enables users to create highly contextualised 3D scenes and digital twin applications for analytical insights and actions across the plant floor, control room, and remote operations centre to help teams collaboratively solve problems with data. The relationships stored in Unify Graph are provisioned as data models in AWS IoT TwinMaker, which is an essential part of making all of this work. Unify shrinks digital twin development cycles by up to tenfold, significantly speeding time to value. It improves data quality through graph-based relationships and brings much needed governance to digital twins that rely on data from multiple legacy IT/OT systems blended together with data from new IoT sources.”