Digital Twins bridge the physical – digital divide, an essential requirement to transform how the physical world works by enabling humans and AI systems to interact with that world. Digital Twins composed on Twinit bring context and understanding of the physical world, by making use of ontologies and knowledge graphs that represent relevant entities in the physical world, their relationships with each other, their behaviors, and related data. Twinit applications can be situationally aware, enabling AI systems, Machine Learning models and rules based expert systems to predict, simulate and conduct what if analysis to optimize how things work.
Applications composed on Twinit can deliver customized user experiences with intuitive and contextual visualization based on the requirements of the use case, and role / persona involved in each user journey.
Cross sector examples include remote monitoring, predictive maintenance, asset performance & energy management, enterprise data integration, command & control, risk management, health & safety, carbon, training and on boarding , stakeholder engagement, and servitisation (pay per use and other business models) of manufactured equipment.
Sector specific examples include master planning, facilities & real Estate, operations use cases including passenger flow and gate optimisation in Airports; urban planning, management of traffic / waste / public safety / land records in Smart Cities; space optimisation and occupant wellness in Buildings; scenario planning and situational awareness in Energy Utilities; demand forecasting, quality and loss management in Water Utilities; planning, simulation and progress tracking in Construction; network operations and network planning use cases in Telecommunication; connected vehicle and fleet management in Automotive, applications for supply chain and process optimisation in Manufacturing, simulating impact of treatments for patients, and virtual health monitoring in Healthcare and many more.
Applications that need real world integration, real time monitoring, simulation, and intuitive visualization, significantly benefit from digital twin technologies. However, the effort to build digital twins and integrate them into applications is not seamless, is complex and expensive. Twinit solves this problem by providing a core set of capabilities that allow solution builders to not only compose digital twins, but also compose digital twin enabled applications on the same platform, while enabling easy integration with third party platform services to complement its core capabilities.
Twinit enables digital twin solutions to progressively mature in sophistication. They may start with being descriptive (collecting & visualizing data), and progressively mature to become Informative (generating insights by analyzing data), predictive (AI powered simulations to forecast outcomes), prescriptive (recommend interventions), or transformative (make interventions to make things autonomous).
Digital twins built on Twinit can be discrete (e.g., a single robot that is part of a manufacturing line or a chiller in a HVAC system, with capability to monitor, implement predictive maintenance, or optimize its performance) or composite (e.g., an entire manufacturing line, or an entire HVAC system providing the ability to monitor, manage and optimize the system as a whole).
Enterprises applications are bespoke and implemented by multiple solution builders. This leads to a heterogenous mix of software applications, built and delivered on very differing technology stacks, resulting in increased lifecycle costs, lack of inter-operability, gaps in maintenance, support and more. CIOs of enterprises are also striving to harmonize data governance, enhance cyber security, ensure agility, scalability, and sustainability, while streamlining vendor relationships.
Twinit solves all these challenges. Its composable architecture allows Apps to be composed by writing “scripts”, which are easily modified and maintained by anyone. The platform establishes a common tech stack and a standard pattern for Apps development. Apps developed on Twinit can be “whitelisted” or “published”, allowing them to leverage and extend data models from each other, while maintaining access control and permissions as defined. Cyber security concerns are largely addressed at the platform level, reducing the overhead of managing security of distinct Apps.
Option 1 involves building bespoke software from first principles. This takes time and is more expensive to build and maintain over its lifecycle. This is the right approach for an enterprise that has very strong in-house software development capabilities, and the digital twin is inherent to its product. A good example is Tesla. Their vehicles incorporate digital twins in a very fundamental way and does not exist separate from their product.
Option 2 involves developing bespoke software, but using multiple distinct categories of platforms that provide packaged capabilities needed to build applications. It is faster than option 1, but comes at the cost of accepting compromises when stitching together capabilities from different platforms that were not necessarily designed to work with each other. Such applications will be less flexible and will pose significant challenges in lifecycle management due to changes to the underlying platform services. This approach will also require the application data to be persisted across many different software platforms posing challenges to data governance and data sovereignty. They will also cost more – incurring many platform subscriptions. It will also inherit some of the challenges inherent to bespoke software.
Twinit is a Platform as a Service that provides a compute environment to develop, test, and deploy your Apps. Solution builders do not have to concern themselves with building, integrating and managing infrastructure hardware / software. They also don’t need to build enterprise grade backend services for their Apps.
Twinit provides all the core backend services that Applications need, while enabling the Apps to leverage third party services when needed. In short, Twinit is the infrastructure, and the backend services you need for your Apps. This reduces the skill sets required to build, deploy and manage Applications, significantly accelerating time to value, and reduces total cost of ownership dramatically.
The short answer is, yes. Twinit is “unopinionated”, your App opinionates it with its own schemas. So you determine what you wish to build. Twinit facilitates the how to build it.
- Twinit is “composable”. Your App is a collection of scripts (JavaScript) that configure the applicable Twinit services the way you choose to build your App.
- Twinit is designed to provide an open environment to innovate. If your App needs services that are not available from Twinit, your App may leverage relevant third-party services as needed.
- Your App can have web, mobile or desktop clients. If you are developing a web client, you may do so using the IPA-Core React framework which is available to you open source against Apache license 2.0
Developing Apps that target the built environment is typically 3 – 5x faster on Twinit, as compared to building a standalone App. The diversity of skills needed for building, deploying and maintaining the App, the associated costs, and the time to value are all significantly lowered. You lower your risk by building your App on Twinit.
An App on Twinit is a collection of scripts (JavaScript) that define the data model, data pipelines, data persistence, business logic, permission models etc. Every time the App is deployed, a workspace is created on Twinit. The workspace provides a dedicated and access-controlled instance of all the scripts related to the App, and the application data. The scripts configure the Twinit services and dictate the behavior of the App for a specific workspace. This architecture allows Apps to be rapidly customized by editing the scripts, deploying them rapidly at scale, and managing their individual lifecycle.