Digital twins and large data quantities - what are your performance tips to deal with millions of (federated) datasets?
Hi community, Aras currently posts a lot of digital twin related content and we jumped on the hype train. We right now combine EBOM/MBOM with ERP, production and test data. User can see data of individual products or can do all kinds of reporting over the complete data. We are still at the beginning of this concept. Right now people are mainly interest in reports and calculations. It´s nothing we haven´t done before. Certain data was already federated in Innovator in the past. But users had to connect certain data from the various sources manually or ask an admin to create reports that are more sophisticated. The digital twin concept allows more freedom to approach. But the bottleneck is currently the test data. We do automated tests of electronic components. A few hundreds tests per individual product are common. So the amount of data is very huge (millions+). Certain queries and reports that are currently possible might probably fail in the future due to the increasing amount of data. It´s not an issue right now, but I want to be prepared for the future. What are the best practices to optimize performance regarding large amounts of federated data? I checked the official Platform Specification that is available online. It contains many hints regarding hardware recommendations for a certain amount of users, Vaults, etc. It´s a useful guide, but it doesn´t cover federated data and digital twin use cases yet. What do you recommend? What can we do on database / infrastructure level? 1. Optimize database structures (better query design, indexing, caching, etc.)? 2. Throw more hardware at the problem? This one is not necessarily an Innovator issue. PLM and SQL are designed to deal with a huge amount of data. There are big corporations which thousands of users and endless data vaulted over the whole world. But I would be happy about anyone that can give some additional insights, ideas or recommendations! Many thanks!! Angela
Digital Twin Core Overview and Installation
One of the newest Aras Innovator applications is Digital Twin Core (DTC). DTC allows for tracking of parts in the field, and it will serve as the basis of our push to realize a fully Digital Thread. How it works The DTC application adds one very important new ItemType: the Physical Part. Physical parts are created from a released engineering part and have additional properties related to its life in the field. In addition to that, they contain a link back to the released engineering part they were created from. This allows for visibility into what exactly is in the field. This is made even stronger by the ability to string Physical Parts together and create a Physical Part Bill of Materials (BOM). Utilizing the BOM allows you to keep track of part replacements and adjustments made to your field units. Additionally, a Physical Part’s work history is saved, allowing you to see exactly where the part has been utilized in the past and the work done to it. Installation As DTC is one of our newer applications, it will only work with Aras Innovator version 12 service pack 7 or greater. To install DTC, you’ll need Aras Update, which can be installed here. Once installed, follow these steps: Open Aras Update and download DTC 12.0 R1 from the list of applications Once you’ve downloaded the package, click install to begin the process. When prompted, chose detailed logging On the final screen, provide the necessary instance information like the screenshot below. If your installation fails, it could be for a few reasons. One of the most common is accidentally pointing to the wrong code tree folder. Another common issue when installing DTC is not having a compatible version of PE installed. Double check to make sure you have the necessary components installed prior to running the DTC installer. If you are still having issues or have any questions, you can post a question to our forums! Once the installation is complete you can open Aras Innovator to see the new application. There should be a new entry in the TOC called Assets which has one ItemType inside: Physical Parts. Now that it’s installed, you can create a physical parts from any engineering part which is marked as serialized. Conclusion There are some very exciting updates coming down the line for this application, but they all start here. Let us know if your company is utilizing DTC! If you have any issues with your installation you can reach out on the forums or leave a comment under this blog!
