What’s New in MindSphere – October 2020

MindSphere releases aim to deliver advanced industrial IoT capabilities that bring the physical and digital worlds closer together.  This update includes many of the newest and most exciting capabilities from the most recent MindSphere releases:

• Closed-Loop applications (CLx): Improved simulation parameters, scheduling and execution.
• Bi-directional MindConnect agent communication.
• Semantic mappings for Semantic Data Interconnect (SDI) .
• MindSphere Start for Free – get free access to a MindSphere tenant.

The Closed-Loop suite of applications is MindSphere applications that make it possible for you to create a complete, closed-loop digital twin with the power of industrial IoT. The closed-loop is created by enabling a bi-directional flow between MindSphere and other enterprise systems and tools your organization uses. With this connection, you can feed product performance data back into simulations to improve manufacturing operations and product quality.

The most recent updates to this suite of products on MindSphere improve simulation operations and capabilities along with some other user experience enhancements. These updates are:

By using the MindSphere Integrated Data Lake to store simulation results, you can now test multiple scenarios without the fear of overriding the data. The inbuilt visualization of simulation results in Closed-Loop System Simulation, which allows you to view results in the context of the simulation model.

In addition, visualization also enables design engineers to compare the results of two data sets, thereby assisting in diagnosing the system model behavior.

MindSphere has made major improvements to the user experience of the CLx applications. Mainly, the Closed-Loop Foundation is decentralized to allow for better operation.

Enable bi-directional communication between MindSphere and selected MindConnect devices. This allows you to send messages and commands to the industrial device and trigger actions (e.g. start pump).

• Bi-directional communication to S7 PLCs
• Write data to these PLCs
• Readout a change protocol. For instance, “what was set, when, or by whom?”
• Set data by UI and API

Semantic Data Interconnect (SDI) is a MindSphere application that empowers customers to easily link data and obtain cross-system and cross-domain data insights with comprehensive analytics.

SDI in action for the Automotive space

This release brings new features to SDI to unlock the contextual relationships across data sources.

SDI Semantic Service allows for configuration into semantic mappings for customized data contextualization. As a result, configure key mapping types of semantic models, both default and custom.

Firstly, define custom mappings for semantic models as applicable for inter-relationships of underlying data sets. This will help to target a wide range of data contextualization use-cases. Additionally, you can define custom key mappings at every class hierarchy level. This setting will override configuration provided at the parent (namespace) level.

Finally, establish the leading source of data, or primary schema, and the underlying key mappings that will be used during query results. This means that the semantic query results are based on underlying data from disparate sources which are mapped using semantic models and mapping configuration.

MindSphere Start for Free is a free version of MindSphere. The experience is designed to help you better understand how MindSphere creates value for businesses, as well as how quick it is to get connected and get started. Monitor and analyze the status of connected devices in MindSphere Start for Free.