2023-10-30 21:15:12
The ‘Open Twins’ open source platform simulates environments and allows the behavior of real assets to be analyzed from virtual replicas.
Three engineers from the ‘ERTIS’ research group at the University of Malaga (UMA) in Spain have developed an open source platform, more accessible and versatile, that allows the design of these technological tools, which simulate real environments from virtual replicas .
These are ‘Open Twins’, the first open ecosystem of ‘digital twins’ in an integrated manner, capable of combining the latest technologies: Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), monitoring, simulation models and visualization in 3D.
The source code of this innovative UMA platform is completely available on ‘GitHub’.
A digital twin is a dynamic, digital representation of a real object, process or system and has the ability to imitate and analyze the behavior of the original.
Although the term ‘digital twin’ emerged in 2010, it was not until about five years ago that it reached its greatest use, which has persisted.
“Until now, most of the existing platforms in this sense were paid and could not be modified,” says the professor at the UMA School of Informatics and director of the ‘Ada Byron’ Research Institute, Manuel Díaz, who states that ‘ Open Twins’ overcomes these limitations and, in addition, adds ‘compositionality’, that is, it makes it possible for the ‘twins’ to connect with each other in a simpler way, achieving more complex structures.
The open source platform “Open Twins” simulates environments and enables the analysis of the behavior of real objects, processes or systems based on virtual replicas. (Photo: University of Malaga)
Open ecosystem
Likewise, doctoral student Julia Robles, main author of this work that is part of her thesis project, highlights that, precisely, the fact of being able to integrate all the components into a single platform, creating an ‘open ecosystem’, allows predicting future behavior. and, with this, the detection of anomalies in advance.
“Today, system simulation and modeling are essential tools in many industries, such as manufacturing and automotive, since they allow us to predict how real systems would work in different situations, avoiding risks,” adds the professor from the Department of Languages and Computer Sciences Cristian Martín.
More efficient companies
The result is more efficient companies, which change their behavior patterns based on the information offered by ‘digital twins’. “Thanks to them it is possible to access a kind of digital ‘clone’ of a real object and know its state in the past, present and future without having to interact directly with it. This facilitates making smarter decisions, reduces costs and increases quality,” the authors agree.
Applications for industry and the agricultural sector
An agronomist project to measure the pressure of an irrigation plan, developed together with the University of Córdoba; a robot that communicates with 5G technology to control movement in the ‘La Mayora’ experimental farm, with the aim of predicting the ripening and optimal point of the fruits; or a predictive model developed for the petrochemical industry 4.0 are some real applications of ‘digital twins’ carried out by the engineers of the UMA’s ‘ERTIS’ group.
‘ERTIS’, belonging to the Institute of Software Technologies and Engineering (ITIS), is located in the Ada Byron building on the Teatinos campus and focuses on the development of intelligent systems and the Internet of Things for industry and the agricultural sector. . The project ‘Open Twins: An open-source framework for the development of next-gen compositional digital twins’ has been coordinated by researchers Julia Robles, Cristian Martín and Manuel Díaz. And it has been published in the academic journal Computers in Industry. (Source: UMA)
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