Open source platform for the next generation of digital twins

2023-11-02 11:28:02

At the University of Malaga they are helping to create the digital twins last generation. Three engineers from the ERTIS research group have developed a open source platformmore accessible and versatile, which allows the design of these technological tools, which simulate real environments from virtual replicas.

The Open Twins platform is the first open ecosystem of digital twins capable of uniting various technologies in an integrated way.

Is about Open Twinsthe first open ecosystem of digital twins in an integrated way, capable of combining the latest technologies: internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), monitoring, simulation models and 3D visualization. Platform details are published in the magazine Computers in Industry and its source code is available at GitHub.

Applications in agriculture and industry

An agronomist project to measure the pressure of a irrigation plan, developed together with the University of Córdoba; a robot which communicates with 5G technology to control movement in the experimental farm ‘La Mayora’ (Málaga), 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 these engineers.

The term ‘digital twin’ emerged in 2010, but it was not until about five years ago that it began to be used more. They are dynamic and digital representations of a real object, process or system that has the ability to imitate and analyze their behavior, the authors recall.

“Until now, most of the existing platforms in this sense were paid and could not be modified,” says one of them, the professor at the UMA School of Informatics. Manuel Diazwho 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.

Until now, most of the existing platforms in this area were paid and could not be modified

Manuel Díaz (UMA)

For her part, the doctoral student Julia Roblesmain author of this work, highlights that, precisely, the fact of being able to integrate all the components into a single platform, creating an open ecosystem, allows predict 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 third author, Christian Martinprofessor in the Department of Languages ​​and Computer Sciences.

More efficient companies

The result helps companies to be more efficient, changing 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 the making smarter decisionsreduces costs and increases quality,” the authors agree.

Reference:

Julia Robles, Cristian Martín, Manuel Díaz. “OpenTwins: An open-source framework for the development of next-gen compositional digital twins”. Computers in Industry2023

Rights: Creative Commons.