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Twined

twined is a library to help Digital Twins talk to one another.

“Twined” [t-why-nd] ~ encircled, twisted together, interwoven

A digital twin is a virtual representation of a real life being - a physical asset like a wind turbine or car - or even a human. Like real things, digital twins need to interact, so can be connected together, but need a common communication framework to do so.

twined helps you to define a single file, a “twine”, that defines a digital twin, specifying its data interfaces, connections to other twins, and other requirements.

Any person, or any computer, can read a twine and understand what-goes-in and what-comes-out.

Hierarchy of digital twins

Digital twins connected in a hierarchy. Each blue circle represents a twin, coupled to its neighbours. Yellow nodes are where schema are used to connect twins.

Aims

twined provides a toolkit to help create and validate “twines” - descriptions of a digital twin, what data it requires, what it does and how it works.

The goals of twined are as follows:
  • Provide a clear framework for what a digital twin schema can and/or must contain
  • Provide functions to validate incoming data against a known schema
  • Provide functions to check that a schema itself is valid
  • Provide (or direct you to) tools to create schema describing what you require

In About Twines (Schema), we describe the different parts of a twine (examining how digital twins connect and interact… building them together in hierarchies and networks). But you may prefer to dive straight in with the Quick Start guide.

The scope of twined is not large. Many other libraries will deal with hosting and deploying digital twins, still more will deal with the actual analyses done within them. twined purely deals with parsing and checking the information exchanged.

Raison d’etre

Octue believes that a lynchpin of solving climate change is the ability for all engineering, manufacturing, supply chain and infrastructure plant to be connected together, enabling strong optimisation and efficient use of these systems.

To enable engineers and scientists to build, connect and run digital twins in large networks (or even in small teams!) it is necessary for everyone to be on the same page - the Gemini Principles are a great way to start with that, which is why we’ve released this part of our technology stack as open source, to support those principles and help develop a wider ecosystem.

Uses

At Octue, twined is used as a core part of our application creation process:

  • As a tool to validate incoming data to digital twins
  • As a framework to help establish schema when designing digital twins
  • As a source of information on digital twins in our network, to help map and connect twins together

We’d like to hear about your use case. Please get in touch!

We use the GitHub Issue Tracker to manage bug reports and feature requests. Please note, this is not a “general help” forum; we recommend Stack Overflow for such questions. For really gnarly issues or for help designing digital twin schema, Octue is able to provide application support services for those building digital twins using twined.

Life Choices

twined is presently released in python only. It won’t be too hard to replicate functionality in other languages, and we’re considering other languages at present, so might be easily persuadable ;)

If you require implementation of twined in a different language, and are willing to consider sponsorship of development and maintenance of that library, please get in touch.