A student team, Team Vision, from the department of Computer Science & Engineering (CSE), School of Engineering, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore campus, won the Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) EngiNX Digital Twin Challenge 2018. This IoT-based design and innovation event is one of the most prestigious student contests in India with participation of over 75,000 teams worldwide. The contest is into its 6th season and consists of 5 rounds running from April through August.

In the Grand finale held at TCS Olympia Thane from August 30-31 2018, the team presented ‘LogiX’, a smart manufacturing system of a digital twin of a logistics and transportation network. A Digital Twin is an exact copy or a replica of a physical asset or a system and behaves similarly to an IoT device creating a digital footprint. EngiNX prize money for the winner was a whopping Rs. 5 lakhs with internship opportunity at TCS for the students in the summer.

Dr. Sasangan Ramanathan, Dean, School of Engineering, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Coimbatore, shared, “I am very proud of ‘Team Vision’ from CSE department for their achievements at the national level. This is a prolific and consistent student team, which has won Smart India Hackathon & Rajasthan Hackathon and also secured top positions in India Innovation Growth Program (IIGP) 2.0 and N/Core Ideathon. This is a true reflection of the character of Amrita, where we believe in our students, nurture and encourage them to follow their passion and innovation.”

Team Vision members are Yeshwanth Sripathi, Vijay Shrevatsan, Anupam Rajanish 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.”

Speaking about the project, Team Vision Lead, Yeshwanth Sripathi, said, “In this industry, it’s not the companies that are competing, but the supply chains that are competing. What we’ve realized is that there is a significant amount of losses that take place due to damage caused to goods and accidents that are probable to occur during transit. To address these issues, we put forward our solution LogiX- where we aim at developing a Digital Twin, overlaying over the Logistics and Supply Chain network. The Digital Twin will ensure twinning of commodity – from the warehouse, where the goods are marked with trackers, and our array of IoT-enabled sensors, transportation over road/air, at the ports where the communication between Control Operation and Shipping Port and that of Truck drivers – for fatigue/ distraction/accident avoidance. Indirect logistics costs can be significantly reduced using the system.”

He added, “LogiX guarantees to provide businesses a platform to view critical information and the digital twin through android applications and a Augmented Reality (AR)/Virtual Reality (VR) headset. This system consists of two data acquiring boxes- namely the AccBox for accident monitoring and ComBox for commodity monitoring. Both the boxes consists of IoT sensors which relay in sensory data in real-time to the analytics cloud- Thingspeak and then to Firebase from where the necessary output/digital twin model is shown in the Android App and the AR/VR Headset. The mathematical model is done primarily using Python along with analytics done through the BigML using algorithms such as random forests and neural networks.”