Digital twins services implementation: Azure cloud

Document Type

Book Chapter

Source of Publication

Digital Twin Handbook Challenges Opportunities and Future Research Directions

Publication Date

11-17-2025

Abstract

Many platforms are designed to overcome the challenges associated with the digital twin infrastructure. These software platforms can be categorised into commercial, open source or custom platforms based on the code availability for core services, acceptable use and licensing provided by the vendor. The commercial vendors provide subscription or license-based software packages, or cloud services, and are increasingly popular among organisations due to integrated features, security, availability and cus tomer support. The Azure cloud by Microsoft stands out from other commercial digital twin platform vendors such as Amazon Web Services. The existing research suggested low-latency and highly scalable configurations, and integrated tools such as access, transmission, storage, analysis and visualisation have provided reduced risks when modelling, connecting, visualising and analysing the digital twins in real time for domains such as healthcare, aerospace and consumer electronics. The Azure Internet of Things, Azure Digital Twins (ADT), Function Apps, Microsoft Entra, Storage Accounts, No-SQL Databases and App Services are a few services associated with building digital twin services using the Azure cloud. The Azure cloud provided Digital Twin Definition Language (DTDL) based on JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data (JSON-LD) to model physical entities and various interfaces such as Azure portal (Graphical User Interface (GUI)), Azure Command-Line Interface (CLI), Azure Application Programming Interface (REST API) and Azure SDK to manage Azure resources and manipulate the data and structures associated with the instances. In the digital twin models, this chapter presents the schemas such as Primary, Complex, Geospatial schemas, and meta-classes such as Interface, Property, Telemetry, Relationship, Component meta-models associated with DTDL with example code. In the Azure services section, the authors will discuss control plane APIs and data plane APIs by using dotnet Framework in c-sharp programming language. The control plane APIs section discusses the creation and retrieval of instances of Azure resources using the Azure Resource Manager SDK. The data plane APIs section discusses retrieving a digital twin instance, managing models, manipulating twins and relationships and querying the digital twins instance using the ADT Core SDK. In summary, this chapter introduces concepts of building digital twin services using the Azure SDK.

ISBN

[9781839538988, 9781839538995]

Publisher

The Institution of Engineering and Technology

First Page

273

Last Page

314

Disciplines

Computer Sciences

Keywords

Azure Control Plane APIs, Azure Data Plane APIs, Azure Digital Twins, Azure IoT Hub, Azure Service Plane APIs, Digital Twin Definition Language

Scopus ID

105027359158

Indexed in Scopus

yes

Open Access

no

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