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Case Study Data
Acquisition Software for Airport Baggage
Handling
The Need
A leading IT company had got the contract
for providing software for Airport
Information System for busy Airport in the
United States. The turnkey project was
handled by one of the leading Automation
player in the world. A small but critical
part of the application was needed to
collect the data from the field devices
which could help to generate various
information reports for System
Availability, Baggage Handling, and
Baggage Scanning Information etc.
All the related process data was coming to
the SCADA which was having a in-built OPC
server, which could expose data to Higher
Level Application. OPC is the de-facto
standard for real time data exchange
between the process (here the SCADA) with
higher level software Applications.
Expertise in the area of OPC was needed to
interface with the SCADA and develop the
base level modules.
The architecture was distributed in nature
with one SCADA handling data per terminal.
Multiple Terminals would be operating
simultaneously at the same time. Hence a
distributed application which can handle
data from every terminal was needed.
Scalability was of prime importance due to
the busy nature of the Airport and the
volume of data that would be coming in.
Since the system itself was needed to
monitor the system availability, the
uptime of the system itself was needed to
be as high as 99.9 %
The Solution
Egenietech, with its years of experience
in working with Information systems based
on OPC was selected as the vendor to
implement data collector part. It used its
technical expertise in OPC, COM/DCOM,
COM+, Multi-Threading to develop a
solution which met the requirements.
Agent Software was developed to handle
data per terminal. The Agent software had
the important task of collecting the data
from the SCADA assigned to that terminal,
processing the data based on business
logic and then storing it to the database.
The data collection from OPC was also made
full proof by implementing feature of
auto-reconnection and redundancy. The
business logic was implemented in object
oriented way to facilitate expansion. In
addition to this the complete status of
the process was also made available in
database in real time to enable user
configurable business logic in form of
scripts.
COM+ components were used to implement
queuing to avoid data loss in the event of
failure of the database. The system also
implemented the concept of Business Date
to take facilitate variable length working
hours and changing starts of shifts.
To increase the availability of the Agent
Software, a special monitor service was
used which would continuously monitor the
health of all the Agent Softwares across
the airports and perform auto-restarts in
case of Agent Softwares in case of faults.
The central service also provided features
to manage the operation of the Agent
Software itself.
The data that was captured was used to
generate information about:-
a)
a) System Performance and
Availability
b)
b)
Operational Parameters like Baggages
Handled
c)
c)
Malfunction Information of various
equipments in the Airport
d)
d)
Information about Scanners and their
baggage handling.
egenietech,
with its wide technology and domain
experience was able to execute a mission
critical and robust software that would
run 24X7 for 365 days.
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