Amazon debuts IoT TwinMaker and FleetWise

Amazon today announced Amazon Web Services (AWS) IoT TwinMaker, a new service designed to make it easier for developers to create digital twins of real-time systems like buildings, factories, industrial equipment, and product lines. Alongside this, the company debuted AWS IoT FleetWise, an offering that makes it ostensibly easier and more cost-effective for automakers to collect, transform, and transfer vehicle data in the cloud in near-real-time.

“Digital twin” approaches to simulation have gained currency in other domains. For instance, London-based SenSat helps clients in construction, mining, energy, and other industries create models of locations for projects they’re working on. GE offers technology that allows companies to model digital twins of actual machines and closely track performance. And Microsoft provides Azure Digital Twins and Project Bonsai, which model the relationships and interactions between people, places, and devices in simulated environments.

With IoT TwinMaker, Amazon says that customers can leverage prebuilt connectors to data sources like equipment, sensors, video feeds, and business applications to automatically build knowledge graphs and 3D visualizations. IoT TwinMaker supplies dashboards to help visualize operational states and updates in real time, mapping out the relationships between data sources.

As for IoT FleetWise, it enables AWS customers to collect and standardize data across fleets of upwards of millions of vehicles. IoT FleetWise can apply intelligent filtering to extract only what’s needed from connected vehicles to reduce the volume of data being transferred. Moreover, it features tools that allow automakers to perform remote diagnostics, analyze fleet health, prevent safety issues, and improve autonomous driving systems.

‘The cloud is fundamentally changing [the automobile] industry, including how vehicles are designed and manufactured, the features they offer, how we drive,” AWS CEO Adam Selipsky said onstage at Amazon’s re:Invent 2021 conference. “[Automakers] are designing vehicles that are fused with software connected by sensors, and systems generating on [enormous] amounts of data.”