This showcase illustrates the use of a mediation infrastructure for the remote supervision process of power supply devices.
Customer benefits
Supervision is operated by either the device manufacturer or a service provider. Such an Internet based supervision benefits to both the manufacturer and the customer operating the devices:
The device manufacturer has access to a global view of all installed devices indicators and can keep track of maintenance and support operations. This knowledge base, shared by every on-site technician, leads to faster reaction time for troubleshooting resolution. Morevover, it allows predicitive and anticipated maintenance around the world, thus leading to reduced operating costs as on-site maintenance can be avoided in many cases by remote monitoring and control.
The customer benefits also from a worldwide source of information. The information, collected from the various customer sites, might be correlated according to conditions of use and is shared among all customers. This leads to reduced support and maintenance costs, faster reaction time and increased quality of service.
This supervision service showcase relies on ScalAgent mediation infrastructure which aims at collecting usage data and events from the devices in order to process them into indicators and alarms through filtering, aggregation, fusion and correlation from multiple sources. The mediation infrastructure aims also at delivering those pertinent information to a supervision server in charge of storing, archiving and reporting global indicators and critical events. The mediation infrastructure is adaptable in order to cope with evolving runtime conditions, such as need for new indicators computation, new customer sites, evolving devices and networks, ... In order to allow such a flexibility level, the mediation infrastructure supports a remote, safe and dynamic reconfiguration process without interruption of service and with no further development at the server or device side.
Architecture Details
The remote supervision solution is architectured as follow:
Collection logic in charge of collecting the usage data from the devices. This logic is embedded on the device or operated very close to the device in order to decrease network traffic
Mediation Logic in charge of processing indicators, creating alarms, aggregating events, ... This logic is distributed all over the networked infrastructure, according to the service provider criteria : response time, network traffic, processing unit capabilites. The more processing can be performed close to the source, the more scalable is the solution.
Storing logic in charge of storing, archiving, compressing but also accessing all informations that needs to be kept in databases. This logic is usually performed at the server level but it can be partially decentralized into a device level storing logic and a mid-server level logic.
Reporting Logic in charge of presenting supervision information and reporting important events through various means : web based presentation, dedicated PDA based HMI, SMS, email, phone calls, ...
Technical integration
This showcase uses the following technical components integrating ScalAgent Mediation Suite and J2EE technical components. The available demonstration mainly benefits from open-source J2EE components provided by Apache and Objectweb consortium.
The technical components involved are:
ScalAgent Mediation Suite with the Mediation Agents in charge of the collection and mediation logic. Those processing units are dispatched at the device side - within a Mediation eServer - and the server side - within a Mediation Server.
A J2EE™ application server, composed of Jonas - an EJB app server - and Tomcat - a servlet server. This is in charge of the storing and reporting logic, where the EJB server implements this logic and the Tomcat server enables the Web-based active reporting of alarms and events.
Joram JMS™ middleware used as the "standard" connector between the Mediation Suite and the Application Server.
kJoram embedded JMS™ middleware enabling the reporting logic to be displayed on a J2ME™ - Java 2 Micro Edition - communicating device.
