This week’s AWS Re:Invent in Las Vegas saw Amazon Web Services announce its IoT TwinMaker digital-twin platform and IoT FleetWise, for handling vehicle data.

TwinMaker is a service that makes it faster and easier for developers to create digital twins of real-world systems such as buildings, factories, industrial equipment and production lines. Digital twins are virtual representations of physical systems that are regularly updated with real-world data to mimic the structure, state and behaviour of the objects they represent.

TwinMaker is said to make it easier for developers to integrate data from multiple sources such as equipment sensors, video cameras and business applications, and combine those data to create a knowledge graph that models the real-world environment.

TwinMaker contains built-in connectors for AWS IoT SiteWise, Amazon Kinesis Video Streams and Amazon S3, or users can add their own connectors for data sources such as Amazon Timestream or Snowflake to make it easier to gather data from various sources.

It automatically creates a knowledge graph that combines and understands the relationships of the connected data sources, so it can update the digital twin with real-time information from the system being modelled.

“Customers are excited about the opportunity to use digital twins to improve their operations and processes, but the work involved in creating a digital twin and custom applications for different use cases is complicated, expensive and prohibitive for most,” said Michael MacKenzie, general manager at AWS IoT. “AWS IoT TwinMaker includes the built-in capabilities most customers need for their digital twins, such as connecting to data across disparate sources, modelling physical environments, and visualisation of data with spatial context.”

FleetWise makes it easier and more cost-effective for car makers to collect, transform and transfer vehicle data to the cloud in near-real time. They can collect and organise data in any format present in their vehicles regardless of make, model or options and standardise the data format for easier data analysis in the cloud.

Intelligent filtering capabilities allow developers to reduce network traffic by selecting the data to transfer and defining rules for when to transfer them based on parameters such as weather conditions, location or vehicle type. Once the data are in the cloud, they can use them for applications that remotely diagnose issues in individual vehicles, analyse vehicle fleet health to help prevent potential recalls or safety issues, or improve technologies such as autonomous driving and advanced driver assistance systems with analytics and machine learning.

“While automakers have collected, stored and analysed vehicle data for years, they are not equipped to manage the explosion of data generated by advanced vehicle safety and autonomous driving systems, nor have they had access to the near-real-time data needed to help proactively address vehicle problems,” said Mike Tzamaloukas, general manager of IoT automotive at AWS. “With AWS IoT FleetWise, automakers can now efficiently collect these data, transform them and gain deep, actionable insights on the condition and usage of vehicles on the road. Automakers can now use the power of AWS to help maintain millions of vehicles, increase vehicle safety and improve customer service.”

Otonomo Technologies, a mobility intelligence platform provider, has added support for FleetWise.

“Today’s connected cars are already data centres on wheels, each generating gigabytes of data per hour,” said Tzamaloukas. “The collaboration between Otonomo and AWS will accelerate automakers and their partners capabilities to put this massive amount of data to use creating new and innovative solutions that will advance the entire mobility industry.”

FleetWise’s capabilities and intelligent filtering capabilities should make it even easier for Otonomo to process and deliver the massive quantities of vehicle data it manages daily into AWS workloads. Otonomo expects the resulting, increased velocity to enable its customers to build connected car applications.

“At Otonomo, we’re committed to driving smarter decisions and services for our customers through the utilisation of connected vehicle data,” said Ben Volkow, CEO of Otonomo. “Today’s announcement helps automakers collect and transfer data to the cloud more easily and efficiently than ever before. We are thrilled to expand our work leveraging AWS and are excited about the additional capabilities made possible.”

There are no up-front commitments or fees to use TwinMaker or FleetWise, and users only pay for the AWS services used.