IoT, Digital Twin and Industry 4.0

Nowadays automation of everything is increasing very fast and it is because of IoT. Today I am going to discuss what Digital twin and Industry 4.0 are and how they are connected with IoT.

Digital Twin and Industry 4.0 both are connected with IoT. You can’t imagine Digital Twin and Industry 4.0 without IoT.

What is IoT (Internet of Things)

In a simple way, we can say Internet of Things is inter-connection between devices, software, smart devices, sensors: it can be buildings, it can be machines it can be anything which can communicate and exchange data with each other. For connection and exchange data it requires internet connections.

Internet of Thing (IoT) requires three basic nodes (it can be more than 3 nodes)

Applications of IoT

Smart Cities – We can’t imagine any smart city without IoT and we can’t imagine IoT without data, sensors and data analytics.
Connected Cars – Cars are connected with each other through internet and they can communicate with each others like Ola or Uber cabs.
Smart Meters – A simple example is a power meter which is installed at your home. If it is connected through internet then the data will be sent to the meter man everyday. It means he has not to visit your home to take the reading.
Retail – If the sale of goods, clients and productions are all interconnected then it will be very easy to optimise your products based on product usability.
Healthcare – High speed internet and IoT make possible to conduct surgery on patients remotely.
Personal Technology – IoT is not just for engineers, anyone can design and use it. It can be used for personal health monitoring as well.
Industrial IoT (M2M) – Imagine that you have to upload data from one machine to another machine, what will you do? You will note data from one machine and feed into the other machine manually. What if the first machine is connected with the other machine through internet or intranet so they can communicate with each other.
Smart Agriculture – What if I am not a farmer and I have to do farming more precisely and to get more yields. Even you don’t have to go to the agricultural field to turn on or off a water pump.
To do so, you just require a soil sensor installed in the field, Internet to communicate and Android mobile to control the motor remotely. If you want to design a smart pump watering system you can visit here: https://in.mathworks.com/help/supportpkg/arduino/ref/arduino-based-smart-watering-of-plants.html

Digital Twin

A digital twin is an up-to-date representation of an actual physical plant as a virtual plant that’s why it is called a digital twin. We can deploy sensors in an actual plant and these sensors data can be sent to the virtual plant through IoT to predict the future of the actual plant. You can create predictive models using deep learning or machine learning. Using digital twins you can optimise your production, parameters, behaviour of plants. And the most important, you can predict the remaining useful life of your plant or a system. You can create predictive maintenance model as well.

Image source:-https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-architecture-of-Digital-Twin-for-digital-manufacturing_fig1_329462066

Some Applications of Digital twins

• Digital twins can be use in any manufacturing industries. Case study of Tata Steel.
• It can be used in electrical power generation system to find the RUL (Remaining useful life) to avoid power breakdown.
• Healthcare produces digital twins of people. Band-aid sized sensors send health information back to a digital twin used to monitor and predict a patient’s well-being.

Industry 4.0

Industry 4.0 is a subset of the fourth industrial revolution that concerns industry.

Industry 4.0 can be defined as full automation and connectivity between manufacturing of products, production, retails, selling, clients, including cyber-physical systems, the Internet of things, cloud computing etc.

The concept includes:

• Smart manufacturing;
• Smart factory;
• Lights out (manufacturing) also known as dark factories;
• Industrial internet of things also called internet of things for manufacturing.

Industry 4.0 is also called smart factory. It creates a virtual world of the real world, cyber-physical systems communicate and cooperate with each other and with humans in real-time both internally and across organizational services offered and used by the participants of the value chain (production, marketing, and the provision of after-sales service).

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An application on Industrial IoT

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