Bearing testimony to the brilliance of Amrita students once again, ‘LogiX’, a cutting-edge student innovation has received international acclaim and was featured in the February-April 2019 issue of the QS WOW NEWS, an international newsletter of Quacquarelli Symonds, the agency behind the reputed QS World University Rankings (WUR). No other higher educational institution from India other than IIT Madras features in the prestigious newsletter.
LogiX, a digital twin of a logistics and transportation network, was developed by the student team ‘Team Vision’ of the department of Computer Science & Engineering at School of Engineering, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore campus. A Digital Twin is an exact copy or a replica of a physical asset or a system which behaves similarly to an IoT device creating a digital foot print. The winning team consisted of Yeshwanth Tripathy, Vijay Shrivathsan, Anupam Rajneesh and Sakthisree Venkatesan, all students of 2016-2020 batch B.Tech. Computer Science and Engineering, and mentored by Prof. Prashant R. Nair, Vice-Chairman, department of Computer Science & Engineering (CSE), School of Engineering, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore campus.
In the present industry scenario, it is not companies, but their supply chains, that are competing with each other and most of the supply chain losses happen due to accidents and damage to goods in transit. These losses can be enormous, often running into billions of dollars. “Taking into consideration the huge losses the global supply chains incur annually, the virtual replica of a logistics and transportation network has the potential to be a game-changer for Industry 4.0,” stated Team vision.
LogiX will ensure the twinning of commodity from the warehouse, where the goods will be marked with trackers and an array of IoT enabled sensors. These will ensure the seamless communication between control operation, shipping port and that of truck drivers during transportation over road/ air at the ports to avoid fatigue/ distraction/accidents. Indirect logistics costs can be significantly reduced using the system.
Further elaborating about the innovation, the team members said that LogiX provides businesses with a platform to view critical information and the digital twin in real-time through android applications and AR/VR headset. This system consists of two data acquiring boxes- namely the AccBox for accident monitoring and ComBox for commodity monitoring. Both the boxes consist of IoT sensors which relay in sensory data in real-time to the analytics cloud named Thingspeak and then to Firebase from where the necessary output/digital twin model is shown in the Android App and the AR/VR Headset. Team Vision clarified that the mathematical model is done primarily using Python, along with analytics done through the BigML using algorithms such as random forests and neural networks.
On this rare achievement, Dr. Sasangan Ramanathan, Dean, Faculty of Engineering of Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, commented that he is proud of the team which has achieved this international acclaim. He observed that, inspired by the University Chancellor and renowned humanitarian leader, Sri Mata Amritanandamayi Devi, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham is always committed to preparing the next generation of graduates for emerging challenges in science, engineering, technology and management. He expressed his heartfelt joy to witness those efforts bearing fruit.
The article also talks about the stellar performance showcased by ‘Team Vision’ in the TCS EngiNX Digital Twin Challenge 2018 and the first ever Singapore-India Hackathon. The newsletter also quoted Dr. Sasangan saying that the list of international competitions won by Amrita engineering students is quite impressive with such prestigious titles such as Mars Rover, Intel Python Hack Fury, Smart India Hackathon, Cisco Ideate and Google Summer of Code.
