OpenTwins: An open-source framework for the design, development and integration of effective 3D-IoT-AI-powered digital twins

Although digital twins have recently emerged as a clear alternative for reliable asset representations, most of the solutions and tools available for the development of digital twins are tailored to specific environments. Furthermore, achieving reliable digital twins often requires the orchestration of technologies and paradigms such as machine learning, the Internet of Things, and 3D visualization, which are rarely seamlessly aligned. In this paper, we present a generic framework for the development of effective digital twins combining some of the aforementioned areas. In this open framework, digital twins can be easily developed and orchestrated with 3D connected visualizations, IoT data streams, and real-time machine-learning predictions. To demonstrate the feasibility of the framework, a use case in the Petrochemical Industry 4.0 has been developed.

Kafka-ML: connecting the data stream with ML/AI frameworks

Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have a dependency on data sources to train, improve and make predictions through their algorithms. With the digital revolution and current paradigms like the Internet of Things, this information is turning from static data into continuous data streams. However, most of the ML/AI frameworks used nowadays are not fully prepared for this revolution. In this paper, we proposed Kafka-ML, an open-source framework that enables the management of TensorFlow ML/AI pipelines through data streams (Apache Kafka). Kafka-ML provides an accessible and user-friendly Web UI where users can easily define ML models, to then train, evaluate and deploy them for inference. Kafka-ML itself and its deployed components are fully managed through containerization technologies, which ensure its portability and easy distribution and other features such as fault-tolerance and high availability. Finally, a novel approach has been introduced to manage and reuse data streams, which may lead to the (no) utilization of data storage and file systems.