News

Real Time Digital Twin Streaming Services Gets a Rules Engine

• By John K. Waters
• January 27, 2021

ScaleOut Software, a Bellevue, Wash-based provider of in-memory computing and streaming analytics services, just added a rules engine to its ScaleOut Digital Twin Streaming Service. The new tool, called the ScaleOut Rules Engine Development Tool, was designed to provide comprehensive features for building and testing rules-engine-based models, the company says.

Digital twin is an engineering term used to describe a virtual model of a physical process, product, or service. ScaleOut is using real-time digital twins to describe its new software model for tracking and analyzing telemetry from large numbers of data sources.

"Because they maintain state information about each data source, [real-time digital twins models] can immediately spot issues unique to that data source and generate alerts within a few milliseconds," the company's blog explains. The approach differs from batch-oriented streaming analytics, which typically do not mine this telemetry in real-time and take hours to days to process. Real-time digital twins are combined with real-time data aggregation in the company's streaming platform to boost situational awareness and provide "unique advantages in a wide range of applications," including contact tracing, telematics, logistics, smart cities, security, financial services, and healthcare, among others.

Using a rules engine as an alternative to writing application code in programming languages such as Java, C#, or JavaScript, this technique reduces development time and lowers the barrier for developers and analysts by eliminating the need for specialized programming skills, the company says.

The list of benefits the new rules engine provides includes:

• Simplified Application Development: The use of a rules engine lets developers describe the operations to be performed as a list of logical rules, instead of requiring code to be written in a more complex programming language. Because of their simplicity, rules engines are widely used in applications where specialized programming techniques are not required.

• Development Toolset: Application developers can build rules-based digital twin models using the ScaleOut Rules Engine Development Tool, which runs on a Windows workstation. This tool provides a graphical user interface and capabilities for defining rules and then validating them by testing their step-by-step execution within the tool.

• Straightforward Deployment: Because the ScaleOut Digital Twin Streaming Service integrates a rules engine into its execution environment, developers need only build rules-based digital twin models, and then deploy them to the service. The rules engine automatically activates the models to process incoming messages.

Additional information is available on the company's website.